


My Red Right Hand Shall Take Thee

by Littlewhitemouse



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Blackrom, Body Horror, F/F, Horror, Horrorterrors - Freeform, OTHER CHARACTERS AND RELATIONSHIPS TO BE ADDED AS THEY BECOME RELEVANT, copious lovecraft influence, everyone is human AU, lesbian sex happens, one incredibly racist character, we mean LOTS body horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-08 06:37:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlewhitemouse/pseuds/Littlewhitemouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Lalonde, through the ancient sin of hubris, has managed to bite off more than she can chew. By 'bite off more than she can chew,' she means 'summon something more evil than she can manage from the edges of the known universe.' The nightmares and the visions of her body being terribly transformed were manageable, but the unpredictable and violent intrusions into her mind and her body are less so. Oh well. Surely her thieving, conniving girlfriend with a fake arm and a wide smile can help her through this. And if she can't, then her equally haunted, equally unpleasant friend at the bookstore can help. And if he can't... well... someone can help her, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obnoxiously lengthy notes are mostly citations. 
> 
> This story was born from a post, somewhere on tumblr, in which there was a gorgeous piece of artwork depicting Rose Lalonde vomiting some horrible-looking black gunk, and a comment on the picture in which someone requested a fic in which Rose was haunted by a horrorterror and getting dubious help from her troll friend in the bookstore in dealing with it. I remember that in the original post, they requested a relationship with Sollux, not Vriska. Whoops.
> 
> I no longer have the link to the original post... if everyone remembers what I am talking about, or even if anyone remembers the picture, I would love for someone to send me a note, since I want to credit those who inspired me to write this. Thanks. 
> 
> Horrorterrors are in the center of this story, and since it's clear that horrorterrors as a device draw a lot of influence form the works of H P Lovecraft, I poured Lovecraftian knowledge and influence into this story. If something, especially something in one of Rose's little vision-dreams, reminds you of any one of Lovecraft's stories, there is probably a reason why.
> 
> Every character is human, living on a non-sburb earth. Fic is in progress, I write slowly. Don't be fooled by the quick dumping of chapters in the beginning. Characters and relationships can and will be spontaneously added, since I write very freely. I hope you all like it anyway : )
> 
> Title comes from a song. I guess I'll reveal the specific song later....

Cicadas blossomed from the dry grass, and rose in quick, widening spirals, their wings shimmering when struck with the glare of the August sun. Rose Lalonde, ten years old, visiting her grandparents in the Deep South, where the wet ground clicked and chirped and the dry air hummed, shielded her eyes with her hand. She stepped forward into the boggy, dead mud with no shoes on her feet, and it swelled and stick in the grooves of her cut and blistered skin.  


Her good Easter dress picked up a thick cobweb, and the spider it came with. It walked across her back for a minute, across her shoulder blades and her spine, while she was unaware, then dropped off and disappeared into the thin grass. Rose approached the old, bent, bitten trees with split trunks and mounds of black bark, and the squirrels and the birds all shot away from her, screaming.  


She put one hand on the dying tree, and walked carefully around it, mindful of the dry beetle corpses on the sterile ground of the tree’s shade. On the other side, she saw, to her delight, a tiny tortoise, with a wrinkled, heavy shell that reminded her of old woman’s jewelry, like mother-of-pearl and polished wood, and greyish legs sticking out beneath. The turtle was running away from her as quickly as it could, like a sleeper in a nightmare who wanted to escape but couldn’t.  


Rose frowned. “Why are you running away?” she asked sadly. It did not stop. She put a hand out in front of it to halt it, but it only flailed to the side, trying to move away from her before she could touch it.  


She followed the turtle with slow tread, trying to put things in front of it to block it or stop it, but it did not move. It continued to run from her. She tried to stand in front of it, and it froze for a second, angling its strange, long head up at her, then looked both ways, frantically, and picked to run to the left.  


Impatient, and affronted, little Rose reached down, placed her hands on either side of the tortoise’s shell, and picked it up, hefting it to her face. The beast, when it realized what was happening, and saw her face rising like the sun before it, seemed to lose its mind entirely. It stopped, it shuddered, with every fold of its wrinkled body, and then it slowly pulled itself, each leg and the hear, inside of its shell, where it could wait in the darkness.  


“Don’t do that,” said Rose, and gave the shell a few hard shakes. It did nothing. “Come out, come out.”  
With a sinking heart, she stared at the unmoving tortoise, and admitted that it would not talk to her, or get to know her. Feeling the sort of unadulterated guilt that a child feels when faced with their own error (which didn’t even seem real before) she slowly put the tortoise on the ground, and stepped away a few steps to watch it.  


For a minute, the tortoise did nothing. Rose tried to poke it once, but it did not react. It remained curled up, like a soldier experiencing shell-shock, tied in his army blanket, wide-eyed, muttering every so often, insensible. Rose sniffled a few times, then sadly turned away to lean against the tree, griming her dress up with moldy bark and pale mushrooms. As she did no, the many ants on the ground in front of her scurried away from her feet.  


“Why does everything run away from me?” she whispered, watching the birds that flew far, far away and the small creatures across the fence that would not dare come near. She looked up above her, at the interlaced, finger-like branches of the huge, sick, ancient and sour tree, and wondered, if it has feet that could move it, if it would run from her too.  
-  


Rose, twenty five years old, bent on the ground, with a beast clawing in her stomach, remembered that day, and knew, though it should have occurred to her before, that all animals knew to run away from humans, and that none were free from the fear of her kind. They had all learned terror from humans. She realized that it was not her fault that the turtle had run from her, and that back then, when just a child, she had truly not been any more corrupt or dark than any other child. She had once been an innocent child. She had.  


And though some might imagine that the wise, wizened trees were more forgiving, Rose, as her vision slowly began to burn away in black spots with red edges, knew that if they could, they would run from humans too.  


She did not pass out. She was not technically losing any blood, even if she had already expelled a lot of fluid, and the strain on her system wasn’t so bad. She didn’t pass out, she just became immobile, shivering, her vision swimming in and out, her head feeling like the mind inside was swelling and shrinking with every pump of blood, straining against her skull, but she fought to stay awake for the pain. She would not risk sleeping. A sleeping human was pathetic prey. Their bodies were useless and their minds were open and weak to any intrusion.  


“Of all tragic flaws to have,” she muttered bitterly to herself, “hubris is so COMMON.”  


Two hours later, her clothes were changed, her teeth were brushed, her feet were laced into thick black velveteen heels, and she stank of lavender perfume. She was walking briskly down the street, travel mug of coffee in hand, looking as if she had spent the day idly shopping.  


Vriska was trying to get her attention via repetitive texting. Rose ignored her. She was sure whatever pointlessly complicated situation the girl was in now could be resolved without her help. She had meant to get to the used book store much earlier in the day, and if she didn’t hurry now, it would close before she got a chance to talk to Eridan. The sun was already threatening to sink on the horizon, behind the spacious rows of suburban houses, through the leaves of occasional trees, and far past the distant cornfields of the farmyards. She had to stop to pull leaves and prickling burrs out of her skirt once or twice, since autumn had just come into its full glory this week.  


The used bookstore was hidden away in a tangle of several small streets on the edge of the suburb which held such rarely-visited stores as the tanning salon, the tea house, the Korean restaurant, the chiropractor, the eye doctor, and the bike store. In city central, there was a huge chain book store. Here, there was the place that only the book lovers knew about, filled with the sort of oddities that Borders would never see, books that had been loved before, books the libraries had abandoned, books that had never been popular, books bought overseas and eventually laid to rest here when their travels were through.  


One of Rose’s closest friends worked there. He was only her close friend because she was his very closest, and he clung to her, having shoved most everyone else away with his abrasive and self-serving personality. Luckily for him, awful people were a breath of fresh air for Rose, since they were all she had known growing up. He was a college drop-out, and, being a college drop-out, he had worked so feverishly diligently at the store that he had become the only full-time employee and was there perhaps half his waking hours, sorting, advertising, beautifying, and selling.  


He was the best employee, and Rose was his best customer. When she walked into the store, heralded by a little bell, Eridan looked up from the tracery design he was painting on the corner of the wall to say “Lalonde, I thought you might have actually not come for one day.”  


“I would pretend that I had business elsewhere, but I really just didn’t feel well,” Rose admitted. She dropped her purse on Eridan’s counter, and he helped himself to her mints. “Found anything that would interest me?”  


“Nothing that would REALLY interest you,” Eridan admitted, “but I found a little piece of fiction you might like.”  
Rose covered her disappointment. “Fiction is nice too. You do know that I won’t pay that much for it if it’s not something that can help me.”  


“We already agreed that I’d give you novels for, like, a dollar each. After you bought that fucking leather-bound antique with the illuminated drawin’ things for… how many hundred?”  


“Stop reminding me,” Rose said, and then she plunked down on the floor beside him to sort through the books in a pile at his feet. “What’d you find for me?”  


Eridan passed her a typical-looking fiction novel, perhaps some four hundred pages, small print, nondescript cover. “It’s not all old and full of poetry like you usually like, but it’s got some beautiful writing, damn beautiful writing, it’s about fairies and a curse or somethin’…”  


“Well, that doesn’t sound bad,” said Rose, laying it beside her. Eridan reached back over to her purse to take out a dollar. “And what’s all down here?”  


“Just some nonfiction I was trying to find a damn place for. Mostly biographies. The HELL that is the back room here,” he moaned. “I go about lookin’ for somethin’ nice to read and get hit by Eleanor Roosevelt on the fucking head.”  


“Did you bleed?” asked Rose with interest, trying to peer at his forehead.  


“No, but I shouda, it was like being whacked with a fucking bat,” Eridan grumbled. “Don’t do that whole ‘wah wah I’m gonna suck your blood’ thing with me Lalonde, I don’t want to hear about your weird vampire fetishes.”  


“Witch fetishes,” Rose corrected. “I need the blood of a virgin for my next spell.”  


Eridan quietly used work supplies to paint something lewd on Rose’s shoulder.  


“Oh, you are certainly in prime sacrifice position now,” she muttered, observing the mess. “Can I look into the back room?”  


“No, you have to be an employee. Key’s on the wall. Don’t fuck around with any of the stacks, if you take something out, let me know.”  


“Have you fixed the light yet?”  


“Is that my job?”  


“I think it is, actually.”  


Eridan muttered something unkind and Rose decided that was enough talking and went to rifle through the book store’s storage room.  


Eridan was in the habit of exaggerating sometimes, it was true, but he didn’t really exaggerate the fact that the storage room was a mess. Since the actual store front, both the upstairs and the downstairs, was literally packed full with books, most of the employees just shoved donations into whatever corner of the storage room they could find if they didn’t look incredibly sellable and left them to rot in the darkness. Before Eridan came in, employees were used to dumping them in random piles with no thought to neatness and picking up whatever was available to shove out in front when they had to. When Eridan started working there, he pitched an absolute bitchfit about it and proceeded to ignore his actual duties in favor of organizing everything in the back room.  


Since, of course, it wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing, he was told he had to stop and was only allowed to go about with his manic need to clean while on break. While doing so, one sweltering August day while flies harassed him and his sweat stained the pages he was trying to neaten, he found something amazing buried in the unkempt piles.  


It was a truly old manuscript, leather-bound and half-faded, decorated with illuminated pictures in gold and blue and green inks, spotted on the edges, with curving snakes and drawings of the sun and the moon and many demons, depicted as strange chimeras—all in Latin, with many pages missing. The staff were absolutely baffled as to the date and source of the material, so Eridan called someone who might know—his friend, Rose Lalonde, bachelor of History and Antiquarian.  


She nearly bent down and kissed Eridan’s hand upon seeing the volume. She pretended it was because of its great age. That wasn’t strictly true. She vowed on the spot to spend all the money they would want on that volume and any similar. She immediately inquired as to the whereabouts of the donator and the obviously missing pages.  


Scrambling through the records of the store, they found out that they had lost the book for the specific year in which that book was donated. But one employee remembered—it was old Professor Scratch, not long before his death. He had come in with a trunk—not a box, a trunk—of very old looking books and said he wanted no money for them. They were meant to be donations to the store. The poor girl at the cash register was baffled, and tried to tell Scratch that they looked like they belonged in a museum instead, but he ran away, and all the girl could do was put the books in the back and vow to ask someone what to do with them later.  


But, when later came, she had forgotten, and she forgot for three years as they became more and more buried underneath romance novels until Eridan unearthed that book again.  


Rose begged Eridan to search through the storage room for other books Scratch had donated, and for the missing pages of that one, and he agreed, asking for more and more hours in the store (he didn’t do anything else with his life and Rose was one of his only friends anyway) until they let him have all the hours he wanted. Rose would join him in the search during any times in which only he worked, and though Rose’s devotion to this particular quest frightened him, he never said anything about it.  


Well, it’s not like he spent all of his time knitting and baking.  


Between them, they found what seemed to be most of what Scratch had donated. They found some of the missing pages of the original manuscript too, though most of them were in terrible shape. Many pages were still missing, and sometimes they still came across a book with his name written in the inside corner of the cover, for Rose to press thankfully, hopefully to her chest.  


Even the books that didn’t help her were fascinating. She eventually stole some information from the local college in order to find Scratch’s former address, but all of her attempts to break in so far had ended badly. He had a lot of neighbors, new people lived in the house now, and breaking into a house was a very loud expedition. It was a vain hope that she would find something of his in his old house years after he died, but Rose didn’t have much hope to start with. She had confidence that she would make it into the house someday.  


Until then, she committed the majority of her illegal actions with Eridan in the bookstore, breaking most of the rules of employee code as they passed a bag of chips back and forth. “Someday, I’ll fix this damn light myself,” Rose muttered, “and take some bleach to the walls myself. Then you’ll be forced to pay me.”  


“You could just get employed here,” Eridan shouted back at her from where he was finishing his paint job. “They love you, they’d hire you.”  


“I don’t work,” Rose stressed. “We’ve been over this before.”  


“Yeah, sure, sure, little miss bourgeoisie sleeps in her pile of dollars all day, good for you,” Eridan sighed. “Sorry about us peasants interrupting your life, your highness.”  


Rose said nothing. Eridan continued to add details to his knot work on the wall. Having sat by him in one class before he dropped out Rose knew that Eridan spent absolutely all of his class time filling up notebook pages with repetitive doodles up and down the bars of the paper. It was gorgeous work, she had always thought, sometimes like Celtic knot work, sometimes like rococo designs of flowers and leaves and little angels, sometimes like the tracery of vines and frost and lace and sometimes like flowing veins. It was beautiful, and mind-numbing, and Eridan had become very good at it over some decades of apathy. Hence one of his few talents other than causing drama bloomed. “I should be closed ten minutes ago, you know,” he reminded her.  


“Really? Were you going to have that paint job done by tem minutes ago?”  


“Shut up,” he said, and tossed the chip bag back at her. She finished it off, dumping all the crumbs in her mouth before going back to sorting through a spectacularly dirty pile of books. “Oh, this is a rather old volume of the Canterbury Tales,” said Rose. “You might want to put it out on display.”  


“You don’t want it?” Eridan asked.  


Rose considered the book again. “Well, the binding is attractive… but I already have a version of the work.”  


“Of course you do,” Eridan sighed. “Miss Lalonde, dripping with culture everywhere she goes.”  


“You said that that’s what you like about me.”  


Eridan shrugged. “Sure, I suppose.”  


They returned to silence for a while, until, eventually, Eridan popped over to the tea house next door to clean his brushes. Rose sighed and began to return the room back into the state Eridan had left it in. She had just finished cleaning when Eridan came back into the store and started shutting things down. She helped him sweep and lock and turn off all the lights, and they silently moved back to the tea house to have a late dinner and a talk.  


Dinner, for both of them, was unhealthily sparse. It always was. Like usual, Eridan asked for fine tea he could hardly afford, and Rose only wanted a simple Moroccan mint. Like usual, Eridan asked for a slice of cake with fresh berries and controlled how much raspberry sauce was poured on, and Rose picked up a tiny pre-prepared salad.  


“Have you gotten any farther?” Eridan asked, spearing a bit of cake. It was always his first question.  


“I haven’t,” Rose whispered. “You?”  


“No,” he admitted. “And Aradia showed up again yesterday.”  


“I’m sorry. Did it go badly?”  


“No, I had what she needed,” Eridan sighed. “It’s not like your problems. I’m just here whinin’ cause I don’t have the money to keep this up.”  


“I can help you with that, I really can,” Rose said.  


“Not til I help you more,” Eridan insisted. “I’ll find your book pages for you.”  


Rose silently pulled some money out of her purse and placed it beside Eridan’s cake. He stared at it, and then slipped it into his book bag. He cleared his throat. “Rose—“  


She held up her hand. “No. I know you need it.”  


“Thanks, I guess,” he muttered into his tea. He was quiet and didn’t look at Rose for a few minutes, until something occurred to him. “Oh yeah, they gotten back to you about that master’s program yet?”  


Rose looked up from where she was trying to convince herself to eat a sad-looking cherry tomato. “They say they’re pretty uncertain about my schedule demands, but they’ll try to see if there’s an advisor who can take me on.”  


“Your demands are sort of nuts, Lalonde.”  


“Yes, that’s why I’ve been so polite about the whole process,” she sighed. Then she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that much, whether I get a masters in history or not. We both know I want access to the university library and to history professors more than anything.”  


“And I’m telling you, you already have a shitty habit a’ breaking into people’s houses, so…”  


Rose delicately placed her fork down on her napkin. “I have not succeeded in that endeavor yet.”  


“Why not get Vris to help you?”  


“The same reason why it was a bad idea for Faust to get Mephistopheles to help him.”  


Eridan glared at Rose.  


“Vriska is the Devil,” Rose clarified. “Surely everyone understands that reference?”  


Eridan spread out his hands dramatically. “Surprise, surprise, Eridan Ampora continues to be fucking no one. Why would that bother you, anyway? I thought you already knew the fucking devil.”  


Rose fell silent. Eridan took perhaps half a minute to realize he had said something pretty awkward. He thought about apologizing, but he guessed the moment was past.  


They said goodbye after half an hour, when darkness had fully set. Eridan began to walk the mile home one way, and Rose walked the other. She occupied her mind on the walk by trying to remember the names of all the stars in the sky, focusing with devotion and determination on the tiny lights in the heavens, forcing her eyes to skip by the great darkness between each one.  


There was Polaris. There was Spica. There was Vega. There was Altair. There was Antares, in Scorpio, which was just falling now. There was Sagittarius, about to rise. There was Capricorn, on the horizon, who was holding the moon right now. There was Venus, hidden away near the horizon. There were the many lights in the sky, and the longer Rose stared at the sky, the more lights she could see, blooming in her eyes as her pupils grew darker, and grew in the darkness. The constellations grew stranger and stranger, developing new limbs, and connections between them, as she found those lights hidden in the depths of the dark sky, as she found the secret malfunctions and mutations—but the tiny bright animals were still in a vast cage of darkness, a void great and massive, that the little lines between little stars barely served as bars to hold it back.  


Rose unlocked her front door and let herself into her house. She lived alone. Her cat had died a while ago. She turned on the kitchen light, and let that sparse glow light up the rest of the house in shafts. She liked low light. Too much light would hurt her eyes, which were sensitive. She took off most of her clothes and walked into her bedroom, intent on reading the little novel Eridan had found for her, and doing nothing else until she fell asleep.  


That didn’t work out. The book was entertaining, and the prose was as rich as Eridan had promised, but after an hour, she found herself with a notebook in front of her instead, staring at blank paper; she blinked (or perhaps her eyes were closed for some time) and she was staring at a page full of strange designs, great circles with runes inside, overlapped with maps of the stars, overlapped with formulaic sketches of Latin words and hexes places against each other as magic struggled to be created, she blinked again, and all there was on the page was one gigantic eye, sketched over many, many times with rough, dark lines, and eyelashes like beams stretching across the entire paper, like the sun’s rays, like reaching arms, like the hands of a clock—was it very late? and she blinked again, and felt something on her face, and then her feet found the ground.  


The ground was wet. Water ran past her feet. Black water. Not dirty. Just black, like the black ice of the ocean is simple black. Dark, with much underneath.  


The columns of the hallway were carved in a style that must be ancient, more ancient that the styles of Rome, because Rose didn’t recognize it, yet they were clearly old, very old, carved of a rock that no longer rested on the surface of the earth, but had been buried far beneath by pressure. The columns were so tall, though, too tall for an ancient civilization to carve. So tall, and so white. There seemed to be little faces carved on them. Perhaps animal faces. Animals, peeking through the leaves, peeking through the flowing trees, which climbed high above in ancient earth.  


Rose walked down the hallway. It was very long, and very wide. She could not see why anyone would need a hall to take up so much space. Her eyes began to drift around, and she was sure there was something on the walls, perhaps carvings, but she was tired, and she couldn’t focus on them correctly…  


The water grew deep. Her ankles were cold now. Rose frowned, and wondered where it was coming from. It seemed to be coming from before her, from some… room, a while ahead. Rose picked up her pace to make it to the room, hoping to see where all the flooding was coming from.  


The room was high, and dizzying, like the domes of cathedrals are dizzying, but it wasn’t like a cathedral. It was not grand, the great vault of air did not inspire thoughts of holiness. The lofty ceiling was too high. It encroached on the territory of the sky, and it didn’t feel right. The walls might have been sloping. She couldn’t tell. It was too high for her eyes to see rightly. There was simply something… shaky, about the geometry of the building, something to suggest it barely stood up. That it wasn’t…. hinged right. The impossible, cosmic space held under the ceiling and inside the walls couldn’t just be held up by stately pillars, there had to be some arms outside, some braces, that held the vast space in.  


She ran for the center of the room. Something… bothered her. The air, the space, seemed so dead. In the center of the room, there was, inexplicably, a fountain. Black water poured from it. In the middle of the water, there was a shaft.  
The shaft was of white stone, like the other pillars, but it was thin, and not so tall. Rose could only see its ghostly form dimly through the black water (which was rising up her legs) so it didn’t really interest her. She was busy staring at the odd… shape of the fountain. Perhaps it was supposed to be a flower? The whole form was oddly fleshy, she supposed. She didn’t have a word for it. The shape was uneven, and alien to her.  


That didn’t bode well. Rose decided it was time to get her dress dirty and peer into the center of the fountain.  


The black water that rushed all over her reaching arms was very warm. The water began to splash over her face as she grasped at the pole in the center, assuming it was the source of the spring. To her surprise, when she grasped it, it began to move toward her. She pulled, and with a terrible thud, that which the tip of the spear had stabbed was dumped on the floor, and all the great black water stopped pouring out of it.  


The water fell… without music. It was hard to explain. It slithered away dully.  


God, something about the room bothered Rose.  


She peered down at the body all the black water had sprung from. Perhaps some poor person had been betrayed in this building, which looked to her like a building of state? Perhaps she had found old Caesar himself, stabbed too many times and left to die in his marble halls.  


What Rose saw was a tongue, mangled and pierced, with a great ring of black and rotting teeth surrounding it.  


Rose jumped backwards, and the spear clattered out of her hand and onto the ground when she dropped it. She watched the great tongue in front of her convulsing, spraying black water and it slithered around the air.  


But for some reason, Rose’s gaze was drawn back to the spear she had just dropped, lying there, innocently, on the floor it had struck. Almost soundlessly.  


“That’s it,” Rose said, gazing at the ceiling. “That makes sense. That’s what I don’t like about the room. It’s so very huge, but there is no echo.”  


Rose’s voice died out only a little bit beyond her lips.  


Rose’s stomach turned, and she buckled in on herself, and she woke up to find black liquid spewing out of her mouth and onto the pages of her notebook, and all over her bed sheets, and everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. It would take all of the liquid in the human body to cover her room like this.  


She fought to control it, but there was nothing she could do. She began to weep as her diaphragm convulsed over and over. Eventually, when she couldn’t breathe, and she had to breathe, or she would pass out again, she found the ability to swallow air. After a few more choked, sputtering gasps, where some more bursts of black water come out of her, she was done. She was gasping on her bed, she was soaked, she was trying to wipe the tears from her face but there was no part of her or her room dry enough to do that, and she was done.  


Her elbows gave way, and she fell onto the wet mess of her bed. She lay there, and she breathed, for what may have been half an hour. It was hard to tell, with her head swimming. Then, she pulled herself up, looked around her room, and wondered how in hell it would even be possible to clean all of this.  


It wasn’t until she was sitting hunched up in the shower that she wondered what all the dark water was.


	2. Chapter 2

She couldn’t bring herself to try to clean it all right that second. She walked to a café for breakfast instead, figuring a short foray into the real world would do her some good. She asked for black tea with cream and a tiny pastry for breakfast, figuring that that was as much as she could manage with her recently upset stomach, and sat down with a fresh notebook and a few separated pages of Scratch’s manuscript to translate. 

She had already tried to work with these pages many times before. It wasn’t that the Latin confounded her, necessarily—she had studied Latin for many years, and still had her old textbooks, so becoming mostly fluent in the language was no difficulty to her. She enjoyed studying tongues. But the text was truly, remarkably old, and it had clearly known bad owners (not the best of which was the used bookstore) so the pages she hadn’t managed to fully translate yet were crumbled, far faded, stained, and delicate. They were not really hard to translate, they were written after Roman times in remarkably basic Latin by a mad man who knew more occult than he knew classical learning, but they were incredibly hard to read. The handwriting of the ancient madman was horrendous. Puzzling over the letters would involve her brain, anyway, and distraction was what she wanted by then. 

“Pour the… pour the mixture? In… circles, moon-like? Why was this man so insane, it makes his wording baffling sometimes,” she muttered to herself. She had always talked to herself. It was a habit that she couldn’t quit. “It would help if I knew exactly what was in the mixture but I don’t think any historian on earth could tell me exactly what ‘flora melancholic strained’ is supposed to be.” 

Rose had absolutely tuned out the rest of the world when someone decided, with a dramatic huff, to slam themselves down in the chair across from her at her lonely table, splattering a bit of coffee as they went. Rose morosely watched a torn, bitten black sleeve wipe up the mess before looking up to face Vriska Serket. “Rose,” Vriska whined, “where have you even been? I’ve been trying to contact you forever.” 

“Now that you mention it, I might remember getting a few texts from you,” Rose said casually, sipping her tea. “I was occupied at the time.” 

Vriska rolled her eyes. “No you weren’t, you were sitting alone in your loner cave.” 

“Oh, Vriska,” Rose sighed, “you have such an admirable talent for being wrong. I was with Eridan.” 

Vriska huffed. “Okay, don’t try to start drama again. I’m not taking that shit from you anymore.” 

“You consider saying Eridan’s name ‘starting drama?’” 

“Eridan IS drama, and I don’t want him in my conversations.” 

“He holds you in high regard, do you know that?” Rose said. She had been trying to visibly hurt Vriska by piling guilt on her for years, but it hadn’t ever worked yet. Her absolute lack of self-awareness was admirable. “He even suggested I go to you for help with a project that he couldn’t manage alone.” 

“He can’t manage ANYTHING. I mean, dropping out? Not really cool anymore. What kind of project?” Vriska looked intent. 

Rose sipped her tea calmly. “Breaking into someone’s house.” 

Vriska’s eyes and smile widened at the same moment. “Rose, Rose. And you make such a show of being a goody-goody.” The show is in looking like a goody-goody. I dislike anyone being suspicious of my actions. It makes it easier to pull off suspicious actions.” 

“Does the Ice Queen have a crush? Or maybe does she need some blackmail? If it’s Eridan, I can seriously just hand you stuff, anything that makes him squirm is its own payment for me.” 

“None of the above.” 

“Then what is it?” Vriska whined. 

Rose traced her fingers delicately along the edge of her cup. “Vriska, do you remember the time I helped you, though against my better judgment, to convince an ex-paramour of yours to pay for an abortion you didn’t actually need by using information about his affair that you had discovered in his computer, which you hacked into, against him?” 

“Yeeees?” 

“I’ve made it a policy to tell you as little about my life as possible. Just in case.” 

Vriska laughed under her breath. It had what might have been a terrifying effect to someone who could be fazed more easily than Rose was. “Rose, we’re friends. You’re one of my favorite damn people, you freak. I’m not going to try to blackmail you. And if you’re so determined not to trust me, why would you tell me about your plans for a break and enter at all?” 

“I don’t have plans. The expedition remains in wish state.” 

“Do you want plans?” 

“Do you want compensation for plans?” 

Vriska sighed. “Rose, I told you, we’re FRIENDS. I don’t need anything from you. Even though I KNOW you’re just sleeping on a mattress of dollar bills and I can barely fill my fucking car. There’s nothing I need from you but your companionship.” 

“My companionship when? The next time you need to steal something expensive from a friend you’re at odds with?” 

Vriska spread out her hands. “Well, I’m helping you do something illegal, aren’t I? Fair’s fair. And I’m perfectly fair.” 

“I remember. You’ve told me fairness matters a lot to you.” 

Vriska smiled. 

Rose finished her tea. “I haven’t decided if I really want to do it yet.” With you, she added silently. 

“Laaaame. Hey, what if you gave me the address anyway, and I scoped around trying to see if the house would be absent any time soon? Huh? Just to give you an idea.” 

“There’s a reason I am reluctant to do this in the first place,” Rose clarified. “The man whose house I am interested in… he moved out some two years ago. This would be a trip in a vain expedition that something of his—preferably books or notebooks—were left hidden in the house.” 

“Hidden?” Vriska raised one well-trimmed eyebrow. “Who’re you after, some sort of spy?” 

“A man whom I believe could have been involved in… shady dealings, of a sort.” 

“Hmmmm.” Vriska tapped her cheek. “Shady deals, huh? Shady deals and books… why not just check out his new house? Too far away?” 

“His new house is the graveyard.” 

“Hey, that’s not impossible either,” Vriska shrugged. “I think I would actually have to charge you for that, though, way too much risk. You think it would be easy to find a time in which a graveyard is totally unoccupied, but no. Apparently stoners hit them all the damn time so the cops are always there. It’s like they’re trying to make my life difficult. Why would you smoke something that makes you trip in a goddamn graveyard?” 

“I doubt he had anything I would want buried with him,” Rose interrupted. 

“Well, true, I don’t know anyone who’s been buried with a book,” Vriska admitted. “Even if it’s a book full of shady whatevers. Seriously, give me the address, let me just look at it, see what would be possible. Please?? This sounds like fun, and I’ve been so bored.” 

Rose dully regarded Vriska’s big, pleading eyes, framed with heavy blue liner like always, with glitter splattered out here and there, and her unbrushed black hair was sticking to her thickly painted eyelashes in places. Had the girl managed to fit MORE piercings onto her face? Rose thought that she might have. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to channel your boredom into something constructive before?” 

Vriska pouted, and then smiled. “Well, you have. You tell me that all the time. And after you say that, you usually…” 

Rose held up a hand. “Understood. I’ll find a different line next time I’m actually interested.” 

Vriska sighed again, and fell back against her chair, letting her head sag over the edge for a minute. She then peered back up at Rose, trying to examine her. “You know, I was the one who made it pretty clear that we’re just an occasional thing? But, for real, I haven’t seen you around in forever.” 

Rose shrugged. “I’ve been in a slump, lately. In my mood. Haven’t had the mind to deal with anyone.” 

Except Eridan? Whatever.” Vriska turned her attention to her hair. She started putting little braids in the tangles. “Yeah, okay, Rose has problems sometimes, I’m sure I can deal with that. Not that she has to tell me when she’s having problems or she’s just not going to contact me for a month, whatever.” 

“You can ask around, I’ve been ignoring everyone for a month.” 

“Yeah, except Eridan!” Vriska repeated. 

“Whether you believe me or not, Vriska, Eridan is only a friend. A friend of as much import to me as any other. I’ve only been in contact with him because our daily lives bring us together all the time. Perhaps if you did something with your life other than playing video games and amateur robbery?” 

“You say that like you do anything other than lie around at home and act pitiful,” Vriska muttered. 

“Why, Vriska?” Rose asked calmly. “Do you pity me?” 

Vriska’s head sharply turned around to Rose. “What sort of fucking question is that?” 

“Do you pity me? Do you think my life is pathetic?” 

“Your life IS pathetic, I’ve seen it,” Vriska growled. “But I don’t pity you for that. You have some guts, and some moxie, right? Your life is pathetic, but it wasn’t forced on you. You live alone, but that’s what you do. You don’t spend all your time languishing away cause you’re scared and shy, you don’t let people shit on you just cause you’re weird. You own it. You live alone and weird and you own it.” Vriska paused to pick something that looked dead out of her hair. “Usually. That’s how I remember you being when I met you. Alone, weird, and owning it. Badass. Your own gang of one. People thought your life was weird, people thought you had to be lonely, but in reality, you could have beaten up any one of them into next week. You didn’t feel bad. You didn’t care about being alone. You were strong. But you’re been getting more and more actually pathetic of late. Less badass weird, more… ugh. You look less confident. Get it together, Rose. Something eating at you?” 

Rose stared at Vriska. “Well, what??” Vriska asked. “What, you going to argue with me?” 

“You’re perceptive, Vriska,” Rose said. “I always thought you were a little unaware. You just surprised me.” 

Vriska held up her hands. “Wow, okay, I’m not fucking stupid? Thanks for the vote of confidence. Anyway, this isn’t me being a brilliant psychic, anyone can tell that Rose Lalonde has been slipping down a terrifying slope of lameness lately. It is written in your huge, sad eyes.” 

“How kind of you, Vriska.” 

“Okay, what the hell about that was kind? I wasn’t even trying to be nice. Sometimes I try, I really do, that that was me not even trying.” 

“Noticing me. Noticing my eyes.” 

Vriska raised her eyebrows, leaning forward onto the table with one elbow. “And now Lalonde is getting romantic with me. Honey, not in the mood today. I was before you started WHINING, but now, nah. You need to get some spark back into you, okay? You know what, we’re doing this break and enter. Give me the address. I’ll scope out the place and find a day. We’ll do this, and when we’re trying to keep our asses out of jail in the dead of night, then you get romantic with me.” 

Rose looked over her shoulder and sighed. “Vriska just asked me out on a date,” she said to no one. “How can I refuse her nicely? I wouldn’t want to break her poor, attention-hungry heart…” 

“Hey, I’m going to stop you there? I got sick of the ‘you just want atteeeeention’ speech in middle school.” 

“Vriska, what can I say? You’re a nice… well…. you’re a beautiful girl, but I just don’t feel about you that way.” 

“Yeah, yeah, heart of ice, promised your hand in marriage to Satan, I know. Gimme the address.” 

“It’s not that I don’t LIKE you,” Rose protested, “it’s just that I can’t commit to a relationship right now. I have problems. I don’t have the patience, goodness, selflessness, kindness, and tolerance I would need for a relationship with you.” 

“Seriously, weirdo, give me the address.” 

Rose pulled a slim pen out of her purse and wrote Prof Scratch’s late address on a café napkin. Vriska snatched it up with speed and precision that would have plucked a fly from the air. “NOW we’re talking,” said Vriska triumphantly. “I’ll find you a time when we can break in, no problem. If there’s anything hidden in the house, I’ll find it easy. You’ll see, I am so fucking good at this.” 

“For once, I believe you when you say that.” 

Vriska stood up, gathering packets of sugar and cream and other such things from the café table to sneak into her backpack. “Damn, I’m almost excited now. I’ve gotta head out and run some errands, babe, I’ll check up on this place the minute I get home.” 

“Oh, your enthusiasm thrills me,” said Rose in monotone. 

Vriska pointed at her. “And you, Miss Moneybags, will look up a nice place for us to eat when the heist is done.” 

“Oh god, you really did sneak a date on me.” 

“No, I snuck free dinner out of you. Later, weirdo!” Vriska called, waving with one hand over her shoulder. 

Rose finished eating the last few crumbs of her breakfast with a frown on her face. She only had to wait a minute before a waiter shyly approached her table. “Miss-“ 

Rose held up her hand. “How much was it?” 

“Miss?” 

“How much was the food that my friend did not pay for?” 

“Ah… twelve dollars seventy cents.” 

“Really? What did she do, dump the fruit bowl in her backpack?” Rose fished a twenty out of her purse. “Take it, it’ll be enough for mine too, and hopefully enough for all the cream she stole.” 

“She what?” 

“Never mind,” Rose sighed, “never mind.” 

“Well… thank you, miss,” the waiter said, backing away uncomfortably. 

“Don’t mention it.” 

Rose spent perhaps the next few hours working through those faded pages. Once she began to work, she could enter a trance that allowed her to keep working until something made her stop. That something, this time, was a dark spot on the edge of her vision. It began as just one dark spot. There was a little cigarette burn in the corner of her right eye that would not go away. Being a long-time and long-abusive contact user, Rose ignored it at first. But then there were a few, blurry, gathering, like spots of mold, or circling flies. When half her right eye was dark, Rose admitted that it was probably time to go, laid some extra money on the table, packed up her book, and made her exit. 

Rose figured that, at some point, she would become used to her body randomly falling apart to admit visions of dark water and fish with sharp teeth into her mind. That day hadn’t come yet. She told herself—be calm, be calm, the wave will pass in a few hours and it’ll be nothing—but she couldn’t quite keep her steps easy and even on the way home. She was losing her vision fast, and now, there was a ringing in her head, incredibly high-pitched, as if she had just heard a loud noise, and these were the echoes. 

What was most important was to get home. If she was home, she could sink into the ground. Scream. Tear her hair out. Whatever she wanted. She couldn’t do that on the street. She looked at her watch, pretended she was late, and ran. She slowly depersonalized, rising above her rushing body as her head filled with oxygen and with noise. She floated into her own head, leaving her heart, leaving her aching muscles to be someone else’s pain, and then she floated above that, into a black sky where the sun was setting on the left, where stars glistened, watching her body run below from the middle of a gaining headache. 

By the time she found her way home and locked the door behind her, she was floating high, very high, in a darkness, as if suspended in the middle of the sea. She saw absolutely nothing, and could not feel her body. There was rumbling red thundercloud where light could have been, and little lightnings of pain began to glimmer here and there. There was a wind of ice, which finally numbed her. 

Rose curled up in the cloud, pretending she was nothing. She shrank to the size of a seed, no eyes, no mouth, nothing to see and nothing to say, no fingers to touch with, and no feet to feel the earth, but she existed still, mute and suspended, in the darkness. She lost her senses, abandoned one and a time, and meant to stay as a particle, a little electron, tossed about in the pitch and the flow of the cloud. But a noise shook through her high and keening, interrupting her shrunken self, forcing her to awkwardly rebloom, to grow senses just to perceive it, unevenly regrowing one eye, a foot, perhaps a hand somewhere, in chimera form, splitting bloody limbs out of bloody gashes, and she gazed with bloody new eye on the pitch-black horizon. 

Something writhed. It was too dark to see its form. Perhaps it had no form. Perhaps void was writhing, like boiling water, or air disturbed. Something had no eyes, no long arms to grasp with, no wings to fly, but something made a noise-feeling like a shattering explosion. Rose’s limbs tore away from her, snapped off like branches of a tree in a hurricane. As a torso, she suddered. 

The something writing filled the darkness. It slid around Rose, and enveloped her. 

She was filled, in every pore of her skin, with needles and venom. It said something. I have been looking for you. I have been waiting to meet you. You are slow. 

The venom was just its voice. All it had done was speak. 

It was the middle of the night by the time Rose woke up. The process of coming back to the waking world was excruciating, long, and boring, since she had to recover her senses one by one and each brought an exciting new array of discomfort and pain. And, to her disappointment, each limb came back, with pins and needles stinging up and down. 

Her sense of touch came last. Her chin was resting against something… slimy. Flesh-like. Unpleasant. Groaning, and hoping she hadn’t vomited, Rose slowly dragged her feet under her in the darkness to sit. Finding out whether or not she had vomited would come after more pressing matters. 

Pressing matters like finding out whether or not she had two eyes and an average number of limbs. 

She slouched down the hall, in the darkness, both hands on the walls to hold herself up. She felt decidedly unpleasant all over. Her muscles ached, her stomach turned, her feet stung, and her head… didn’t think. She kept herself in darkness. Turning on the bathroom light was blindingly painful, but necessary. 

She waited for a few minutes until she could open her eyes. She had two, in the normal color, although bloodshot. The rest of her face was human-like and average. She appeared to have two arms, each with only five fingers balanced on the end (though they seemed odd, and far away, and she didn’t like to bend them) and beneath her there were two legs with two feet. One had gained an impressive bruise from hitting SOMETHING, but was otherwise accounted for. 

“I could just be hallucinating an average appearance,” Rose mumbled to herself. “I’ve hallucinated before. My hallucinations are usually of things abnormal, but there’s always a first time.” 

All the same, she walked like a human, and from any angle of the mirror, she was consistently human, so she figured she probably wasn’t actually a slouching aborted fetus. Satisfied with her life, she decided to lie in bed for a while, thought she had no delusions about sleeping. She just wanted to lie down and stare at the ceiling. 

She left the light of the bathroom on behind her. The hall was barely illuminated, but it gave her a good look at the wings of the flies, briefly lit, that seemed to have gathered in her house. Wonderful. Some rotting food from downstairs had probably attracted them. But, with growing apprehension, she noticed that the flies grew thicker and she neared her bedroom. And, approaching the threshold, she held her breath and turned on the light. 

For a second, she didn’t recognize it as her bedroom. It wasn’t the same room. It couldn’t be the same place. Everything was different. The colors, the shape, the size. 

And then she did recognize it as her room. Her room, but infested. It was covered, like a forest could be covered in a foot of snow, with something black. It was everywhere. It grew out of her walls, horizontally, grasping, almost like it had tentacles, curling, not towards a light source, but towards the open air, anywhere. It buried into the pores of her quilt and infested her bed sheets. It was in the pages of her precious books. It was crawling towards the ceiling and already buried in the carpet. 

It was an incredible, impossible crop of slimy, horrible, stinking black fungus. They grew like black fingers, tapering on the end with many thin spores, reaching for anything new to devour. There was an impressed hole in the growth where Rose had collapsed hours earlier. Rose was baffled. She had no plausible idea of how her house had sudden burst forth into a subterranean, archaic garden. 

Then, Rose finally remembered vomiting gallons of stinking black water all around her room the day before. Stinking black water that had been full of unknown proteins and life forms. And in frustration, disgust, and fear, Rose screamed. \- 

Rose cleaned and bleached until the dawn. With persistent fury, she hacked away every damn stalk and shoot, though no matter what she did, the black stains didn’t quite go away. She spent the first two hours of the morning showering, scrubbing, and showering again. She didn’t see anything on her body. She didn’t. Well, except the gigantic black bruise. Which was surely cause by knocking into a table or something as she stumbled into the house. Of course. It was obviously a bruise, since scrubbing at it only made it worse. And it hurt like bruises did. And that was the only place on her body where she saw discoloration that she hadn’t had before, so surely, if anything got on her, it was gone by now. 

What if it was in her eyes? That was where the black spots started. 

Rose wore her contacts that day as she walked out to meet with Eridan. He opened the store on Wednesdays. She wore her contacts, and a long black skirt, and long purple sleeves, and lace gloves over her fingers. She just wanted to keep her skin hidden from now. Away from the sunlight, just in case. 

She arrived at the shop just after Eridan. He was used to her waking very early, though, so he didn’t really comment on that. He just waved sleepily at her before collapsing behind the counter with his pumpkin spice latte and chocolate croissant set out before him, sighing heavily. 

“No sleep?” Rose asked as she set her purse on his counter. 

“Plenty a’ sleep,” he sighed. “Nothing fucking else. I can’t remember the last time I went out to a party or somethin’.” 

“Halloween is approaching,” Rose suggested. “It’s easy to find places to be festive on Halloween weekend.” 

“On the list of people for which Halloween is a bad idea, Eridan Ampora tops the list,” Eridan groaned, taking a sip of coffee. “Well, almost. Rose Lalonde may claim that place if she wishes.” 

“Rose Lalonde does so gladly,” Rose said as she walked into the storage room. To her surprise, the light flickered on. “Well, look at who has gone above and beyond the call of duty,” she commented. 

“I finally got bitched at for not doing it.” 

“Doesn’t this shop have other employees?” 

“Technically, as the only full time, I have responsibility or somethin’.” 

“Heavens, anything but that.” Rose settled down beside the pile she had been working on just the day before, removing the books she was sure she had looked through. “Oh, did you set out that Copy of The Canterbury tales?” 

“I did. For something so fuckin’ old, it looked good. Hopefully some English major will spot it.” 

“Perhaps you should try reading it instead.” 

“Rose, I’m going to be level with you. I looked at it and I really don’t think it’s in English. Besides, old lit is your thing, not my thing.” 

“Why, do you think it will be dull?” 

“Six hundred year old poetry? Pretty sure it’ll be dull.” 

“Skip the prologue and the Knight’s Tale and read the Miller’s Tale to start. Even though it’s a federal crime to skip the Knight’s tale, I shall make an exception just for you.” 

“Why, exactly?” Eridan asked. 

“Trust me.” 

“Rose, I really don’t do that.” 

Rose paused. “Well, maybe that isn’t a bad idea.” 

They were both silent for a minute as Eridan wondered what to say to that. Rose, meanwhile, wondered how to say what she was going to say next. He had to know. No one else really had to know, but she had promised him. “Eridan, I should tell you something.” 

“You should.” 

“I should.” Rose was silent again. 

“Rose,” Eridan said eventually, “This is an awful lot a’ awkward buildup. You’re stressing me out.” 

“I apologize,” Rose said, feeling suddenly annoyed. “Well, perhaps it isn’t that important.” 

“Sure it isn’t, that’s why you’re being so cagey about it. You sick? Have you come down with horrorterror cancer?” 

“I do not have cancer.” 

“Well, awesome. Is it an autoimmune disease? Those things are bitches, I promise you.” 

“There is nothing wrong with my body, Eridan. I haven’t seen a doctor in years.” 

“Christ, then how do you know there’s nothing wrong with your body? Rose, you gotta go to the doctor every damn year, it’s important. Especially since you’re a lady and the doctor had to check all the lady things, which, I am told, can go from rosy and happy to vindictive and deadly in a month flat.” 

“Eridan, we made a deal. Keep your obsessive ticks and your paranoia over there, and I will keep my schizophrenia-like symptoms over here.” 

“It’s not paranoia, that’s what they tell you to do! Breast cancer doesn’t wait three years, ask any woman with one of the damn pink ribbons—” The bell rang on the door, and a pair of young women Rose didn’t recognize walked in. Eridan immediately turned his attention to them. “Good morning, young Ladies. Is there anythin’ in particular I can help you find?” 

To understand why Rose had to muffle her snickers at the line, you would have to hear how Eridan said it. 

“Oh, we’re just looking,” said the one, and the other commenced to lean into a shelf and browse the titles with the hawk-like gaze of the regular book reader. 

“Hey, maybe I can make recommendations,” Eridan offered. “You tell me what you like, and I’ll find something I know you’ll love.” Rose outright giggled. 

“Pay no attention to the woman behind the doorway,” Eridan added. “You fantasy fans maybe? Into classics? Or maybe nonfiction people?” 

“Science fiction,” said the woman string down the shelf. 

The next half hour was spent in a discussion on the merits of Marion Zimmer Bradley and on whether or not Orson Scott Card was a gigantic douche. The two girls did end up buying a few books Eridan particularly gushed over—though the thing about Eridan and books, a thing Rose enjoyed about him, is he gushed over every book he liked. He was normally a picky person, admitting partiality as if it were defeat, but for books, he had hours full of good things to say about any book he liked. It was nice to see a man who normally lived in apathy to look so impassioned. 

The door jingled again on their way out. There was silence for a few minutes, as Eridan tapped a pen against the counter, and Rose put books aside one by one. “It’s getting worse.” 

“It’s what?” 

“It’s getting worse. I’m having a lot of episodes lately. I don’t think running and evading is really working anymore.” 

“No,” said Eridan, and she heard his chair scraping as he got up to walk to her side. She didn’t look at him. 

“I woke up to find my entire bedroom infected with a black, mushroom-like fungus that I had vomited the day before. I can still feel pains in my muscles and bones from the nightmare I had last night. I lost my vision for a while yesterday. Over the past fortnight, I have been certain that my body is mutating maybe five times. I’m not running anymore. I’ve been found, and I’m being teased.” 

Eridan tried to embrace Rose. It didn’t work. Mostly because her physically shoving him off of her back was involved. “I don’t know how much time I have to try to convince it away.” 

“Aw, Rose,” said Eridan. “Okay. Look. I’ll help you. I’ll help you looks for somethin’ in here that can help you. I’ll spend the whole day here, except when there are customers, right? Jade has the evening shift… I’ll ask her if we can stay in here while she’s working, she’ll let us, she’s unnaturally kind and pleasant, that one. Always wondered if there was somethin’ wrong with her. I heard she was a feral child? Okay this is not important.” Eridan clutched at Rose’s hand, then dropped it, then reached for the books ahead of him. “There’s gotta be somethin’ the bastard dropped off still languishing in here unnoted. We just gotta find it.” 

“Thank you,” said Rose briskly. 

“No problem, Rose,” Eridan said, biting his lip. 

That’s what they did for the rest of the day. They pawed through piles of old, musty books. Eridan only left when the door sounded, and Rose only left once to buy them iced tea and various unhealthy pastries from the tea shop. They hadn’t found anything of Scratch’s by the time Jade walked in several hours later. 

Eridan hopped out of the storage room, stretching his muscles. “Harley! Good to see ya. How’s… life? How’s the dog?” 

“Excellent, and wonderful,” she said. “You okay over there? You look a little… covered in cobwebs?” 

“Oh, yeah, I’ve been in the storage room, whatever…” Eridan shrugged. “Oh, remember Rose Lalonde?” 

“Yeah, of course,” said Jade, who was already putting the puzzle pieces together and craning her head to look behind Eridan. 

“Yeah I… sort of have her over here? And I was wondering if she and I could stay here until closing?” 

Jade put her hands on her hips. “Eridan, this is not the time or the place for shenanigans.” 

“Okay, the nature of the ‘shenanigans,’” said Eridan while rolling his eyes, “is that we’re lookin’ for somethin’ IMPORTANT. You trust me when I say Rose Lalonde isn’t dating material.” 

“It is true, I have taken much inspiration for my relationships from the black widow spider,” said Rose in a monotone from the back room. 

“Eridan Ampora, I am going to trust you with this,” Jade pronounced. “You two keep quiet in there and don’t show up around any customers, and I’ll let this happen. Don’t TELL anyone I let you do this, though! This is against… probably all of the rules!” 

Eridan clasped Jade’s hands. “Thank you SO MUCH Harley, I’ll make it up to you, I swear I will,” he gushed. 

“He won’t,” Rose informed Jade. “The man is practiced in the art of empty promises.” 

“Ignore Rose, badmouthing decent people is her weird fetish,” Eridan countered. 

Jade put up her hands. “Part of your payment for this favor is not letting me know anything about your relationships, Eridan.” 

“Sure, fair play,” Eridan decided, and, grabbing his stuff, ran through the store to get back to the storage room. “Thanks a bunch, Harley!!” 

They found nothing that day except for a torn-up half page that Rose thought might have been part of one of Scratch’s books, but quietly, Rose despaired of getting anything from it. She planned to start looking in earnest for different sources again. 

They heard Jade begin closing the store not long after the sun had set, and Eridan silently got up to help her. Rose told herself that she should make use of these last few minutes to keep looking, but she couldn’t do it. She sat in the back room, in the clutter and the dust, and she stared blankly ahead of her. She didn’t think anything momentous. She didn’t realize that this could well be the moment her life began to turn unstoppably for the worst. She didn’t think about anything at all, in fact. She stared in front of her, and dully felt that it was terrible, where she was, and what she was doing, and the last of the sunlight outside faded from the room, and she just let the darkness envelop her. This was the sort of numbness that came from being very tired. She did not care that it was dark. She did not care that it was cold. She would not have cared if spiders and rats crawled over her and used their little teeth to fray her skin. Nothing could move her. She felt like a rock, with heavy fingers attached to the heavy ground, with heavy head hanging down, and cold, and still, and gray. 

“Alright, Harley’s gonna kick us out,” Eridan reminded her. 

“I know.” Rose didn’t want to talk. She silently pulled herself upwards by her own puppet strings, listing to her bones crack as she did so, and gathered her purse from the floor. “To the tea shop, then?” 

“Yeah, sure, I’ll grab a table,” Eridan said, and disappeared. 

Rose slowly parted the darkness of the room in front of her, and found herself in the front room alone with Jade Harley. Jade peered at her, curiously. They had only met in passing before. Rose’s impression of the girl as of yet was ‘inoffensive.’ “Good evening,” Rose said. 

Jade giggled. “Good evening!!” she replied, like saying it was hilarious. “Boy, I don’t know what I imagined Eridan’s friends would be like, but you’re certainly it.” 

“In what way?” 

“Oh… you’re very nice-looking, like, sophisticated,” said Jade, counting off on her fingers, “and you have the sort of melancholy air he has too… you know, you’re the same sort of person!” 

“Oh, god, do you think so?” asked Rose with put-on distaste. 

“You’re similar, that doesn’t have to be bad,” Jade said. “You know, Eridan has his good side too.” 

“Really? Where has he been hiding it all this time?” 

“You have a spider web on your shirt. No, down there. And I dunno, where ever you aren’t looking.” 

“What, there’s more?” 

“No, his good side. It must be hiding wherever you aren’t looking.” 

“I know him well,” Rose countered. “I don’t know what he would still be hiding from me. He has good traits, but they weren’t through any effort of his own.” 

“What does that mean?” Jade asked, genuinely confused. 

“I mean he only has those good traits that he was born with, and survives off of those. I’ve never seen him strive to gain any others.” 

“Oh, he’s not that bad. What, he’s obnoxious sometimes, I won’t pretend he’s not a terrible misogynist sometimes too, but he’s so much more mature than when he first started working here…” 

Rose put up her hands in defeat. “Very well, I depart on my journey to rediscover the true Eridan Ampora, since he has apparently had a great change of heart. Farewell.” Rose figured it was pretty obvious that she was looking for an excuse to end the conversation, but she took the chance anyway and headed out the door. She hated talking to people she didn’t really know. It felt like taking a test. 

Eridan was still instructing on the waitress on EXACTLY how she must make his tea, so Rose made her selection of tea and scone in peace and sat down long before he did. When he finally sat down, muttering about the incompetency of baristas, Rose found herself, unwillingly, taking a long look at him. 

Maybe she did remember a younger Eridan. One who hadn’t matured much yet. An Eridan in college, recently out of a sheltered home, self-absorbed yet unaware how to care for himself. But yet Rose couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that Eridan was a sparkling example of personhood yet. He had only grown where he had been absolutely forced to. Didn’t he still treat waitresses like they were his slaves, after all? A man could be best judged by how he treated those he found beneath him. 

And Rose knew his opinions on that. They couldn’t have changed that much in some few years. 

“How’s the white power group?” she asked, deciding to get right to the point of her thoughts. 

Eridan rolled his eyes and groaned. “Rose, you know I’m not in it anymore. They were way too intense. Talking violence and shit.” 

I continue to be right, Rose thought to herself. “I suppose that was something more that you did in college. You know, for the year you went to college.” 

Eridan put up his hands. “What is this, pick on Eridan day? Are you mad about something? Do I really have to go through the patented Lalonde system of taking your anger out slowly in little nibbles today?” 

"Yes, Eridan, I am passively furious that you didn’t solve all my problems today,” Rose said, while piling little pieces of feta onto her spinach. She usually didn’t put dressing on her salad. She just ate the vegetables plain, with whatever dried fruit and cheese they found fit to dump in there. It used to be disgusting, but now she couldn’t remember it any other way. Eating any amount of fat usually made her… never mind. 

He sighed. “Rose, what the hell do you expect me to do? Politely ask the world-eating god-abomination to leave you alone? I think you should know that that sort of doesn’t work.” 

“Eridan, I’m not actually mad at you,” Rose clarified. 

“Then what the hell was all that picking on me?” 

Rose paused. “Well, what the hell was all that being in a white power group and dropping out of college?” 

Eridan glared at her for several seconds. It’s wasn’t the sort of ‘oh, fuck you’ glare that a friend would give another giving them a hard time. His bright eyes went into slits. “I didn’t sign up for you to be my conscience, Lalonde. Anyway, you know what the hell dropping out of college was. That wasn’t my fault.” 

“Of course.” 

“I mean, at the beginning, but afterwards, I couldn’t help…” disruption of his linear train of through dissipated his anger into frustration, and he leaned back with a huff. “Whatever.” 

“Whatever indeed,” Rose agreed. For a minute, Eridan just speared at his fancy chocolate cake without saying a word. Rose wondered if he had developed the ability to let an argument go. 

“I don’t know why YOU think you can pick on me for my faults,” he snarled. Nope. “I think we’ve established that you aren’t a saint. I don’t know why I even help you get out of the pit you dug yourself.” 

“Because I did the same thing?” she asked. “It’s a fair return. And I continue to help you pay for your… problem.” 

“Fact remains that you’re no shining example a personhood either. In fact, sometimes, you’re a downright shitty person. Like now, when you’re aggressing me for no fuckin’ reason! Did I do something to you?” 

Not to me, Rose thought. But she left that one alone for now. “Yes, we both know I am not a good person. The thing about that is it gives me the perspective to know when someone else isn’t a good person either and when they need to work on their character. Knowing your own faults gives you excellent insight into others. It isn’t hypocrisy, it’s using your own experience.” 

“I wonder why it sounds so damn much like hypocrisy, then.” 

“Because the word ‘hypocrisy’ had to be coined by people who didn’t like to be examined,” Rose sighed. “I can judge you as a flawed person because I am flawed myself and I know what it’s like. What about that doesn’t make sense?” 

“The point where you bring it up out of nowhere, for no reason, when I’m trying to eat my dinner! Seriously, what the fuck did I do to you today? I was perfectly nice all day! I spent my whole day helping you look for your imaginary books! I didn’t HAVE to, you know.” 

“No, you didn’t,” Rose agreed. Her mood shifted abruptly. 

“What, do you want me to stop then? Head out on you? Is this your way of trying to shove me away because you’re too dangerous or some shit? I think you should know exactly why that doesn’t fuckin’ threaten me.” 

“I don’t want you to head out,” Rose muttered. “You’re my friend. I want you to help me for reasons other than a feeling that you have to.” 

Eridan deflated a little, slumping in his seat. “Well, you’re my friend too,” he said, “but I don’t even know why sometimes.” 

Rose was quiet. She missed having the assurance that things weren’t totally her fault in moments like these. She was sure Eridan was at fault too in how shitty their friendship was sometimes but right now she didn’t remember quite why. Probably one of the worst thing about living in a surrealist horror movie inside your own head was the absolutely inability to know whether your hunches and convictions were based in reality or full of fabrications. She hadn’t been able to participate in a political discussion for a year now. She never had any way of knowing if her opinions were factually founded. “I must have cast some diabolical spell on you to assure your friendship,” Rose said lightly. 

Eridan looked away. “Yeah, the ritual of ‘who else do I even fuckin’ have.’” 

“Eridan,” Rose chided. “You know that Karkat cares for you. Jade too. And Equius and Gamzee and Vriska all like you, don’t they?” 

“They’re Karkat’s friends,” Eridan muttered. “Besides, Vriska? Vriska doesn’t like anyone.” 

“Bad example,” Rose agreed. “The point is, I won’t listen to you complaining about how you’re alone in the world again when you’re literally having dinner with someone who cares and listens right now.” 

“If you care and listen, why do you always bitch and shut me up?” Eridan argued. 

“Are you going to be in a mood for the rest of the night?” 

“Maybe I am.” 

It was silently agreed that they weren’t going to talk to each other for a while. They ate, and Rose tried to remember what made a good person in the first place. Maybe she couldn’t judge that, because she had never been one. That was probably it. That’s why it was all so confusing. Of course she could judge terrible people, she knew them. She was right about that much. But she didn’t know how to judge what a good person actually was. 

I guess they’re nice, she thought pathetically. 

“I wouldn’t want to leave tonight with you angry at me,” Rose said eventually. 

Eridan sighed. “I guess I’m really not that angry anyway.” 

“Okay.” 

That was the most she got out of him, aside from pleasantries when she left to go home. 

It seems to be a rule of the universe that, even for someone who lives in a veritable hell, not everything can be terrible, not everyone can betray them, and not every night can be a nightmare. The jury is out on whether that is a mercy or not. Whatever the nature of this rule is, Rose slept soundly that night, soundly, deep, and darkly, feeling as if she was walking through a forest in winter in deep snow, where no creatures lived to make noise, where no wind rustled the branches, where no light mottled her vision, and all the streams that once chattered and sighed were silenced by ice. It was numbing and comfortable, and her veins ran dully, as if she had taken some sort of drug. (She hadn’t, she never did. They made her vomit.) She was only awoken when one dead bird pulled its little white bones out of a drift of snow to open its clattering beak and sing. 

It was a blue jay not far outside her window. Rose blinked at the sunlight of the morning, which was warm, pouring from her un-blinded window and filling her bed. It felt nice. She curled into a ball and laid on her side for a while, breathing, comforted by the light of the sun and blessing of bird song. 

It baffled her. It really did. The world continued, in so many ways, to be good, no matter what. There continued to be something nice, like the light of the sun, which was so consistently comforting, so continually pleasant and warm, and so permanent a promise that its goodness was almost eternally assured. The gift of birds to the world was a sign of true benevolence, even if she couldn’t believe it was from god. 

She got up to shower. When she twisted her legs, they knocked against something on the bed, but didn’t knock it off. In confusion, she squinted through the light to see what was in her bed. She couldn’t have POSSIBLY brought a person in her? 

Her room was blossoming again. Black fungus erupted out of her bed and above her head like a canopy of dark leaves, drinking in the sunlight, silencing the world, burying her in warmth. 

She couldn’t bring herself to be quite as shocked and appalled as the day before, though she was very annoyed that they had come back. She had bleached the walls, but in her panic, she had forgotten to wash the bed sheets—and that seemed to be where they had begun to grow last night. 

“I wonder if it’s possible to burn down one room and leave the rest of the house intact,” she muttered. She’d have to look up how fumigators usually got rid of mold and try a heavy-duty version of that. 

Until then, she was going to shower. Maybe for an hour. There were flies circling the room now, and she didn’t really feel clean.


	3. Chapter 3

 

The day was spent researching hell mycology. She knew that sending some lower species to infect their prey was a common tactic for horrorterrors, so now that she was past the initial shock, she wasn’t so surprised. She hadn’t done a cleansing ritual in a long time—they weren’t her thing, she enjoyed grit and mud, and the only magic she had ever done involved getting dirty, so cleansing was counterproductive—but she seemed to be slowly getting a good idea of what the fungi were and how to eliminate them. They were essentially to the horrorterror what stomach bacteria are to humans—they aid in digesting and dissolving prey through toxins emitted into the air—though she still wasn’t sure how it had managed to transfer them to her room through her stomach. Anyway, since her bedroom had now become one giant horrorterror digestive system, it could all be cleansed by whatever was toxic to the horrorterror. Since she didn’t have any silver moon fruits, that would probably have to be something along the lines more of incense, pure air, and water from a running river in the woods. 

Luckily for her, she did have a makeshift forest of sorts, where the suburb gave up a mile out into the sort of nut-bearing trees and tall grasses that had been on these plains beyond memory. It might be more polluted than the cleansing ritual would like, but it was old, there was a running river, and there was a wonderful atmosphere, collected from the pensive thoughts and peaceful wandering of centuries of exploratory people. It was a place that made people happy, as all quiet nature preserves in populated places do. 

The leaves lay in a thick, molding carpet, wildflowers sprang up from every corner and crack in the ground (Rose caved in a collected a small clutch of buttercups and clovers to dry) and birds sang from hidden places in the shadows above. It was calming, uplifting, and quiet, as is if this clutch of other species had been collected to soothe humankind. Rose found herself, more solemnly than she expected, wishing there was more friendship between humans and the other animals on the planet. They could be good for each other: provide food and shelter, provide calm and assurance, be loyal, be helpful, be good.

She finally found the creek hidden where some willow trees sprawled. She was sure a deer darted away from her at some point. She used a metal mixing bowl—the only container she had that could carry water and even pretend to be a natural material—to sweep the rushing currents, through eddies and waves, into her hands. She thought of Aquarius, the water-bearer, whose sign would be rising in the sky before so very long.

She walked back with steps as even as she could make over the cold ground, which was littered with branches and spiny plants, despite her being barefoot, and her skirts gathering burrs and thistles behind her. She noticed she caught some living creatures in her river water--- water bugs, tiny green things, the nigh-microscopic life of living water. She was glad, and thought this could help her, earth life against alien life.

She avoided wondering why it DID help. She had watched chanting and incense inexplicably solve problem too many damn times to bother with logic any more. Instinct was enough in the life she lived.

She was running for her life, after all.

She poured the river water in tiny streams through her fingers and onto the fungus all over her room. They seemed to sincerely not like it. The incense she had left burning, with the scent of clean white flowers, coupled with a scentless, white candle, had filled the room with smoke and smell and heaviness. She flung the window open, pulling in a gust of wind, which rushed, cold, through her hair and into her eyes, and caused the pictures on her wall to rattle and shake. The candle voiced its annoyance, but did not go out.

With that, she resolutely drew a circle, muttering whatever came to her mind about cleansing, about her room belong to her, and about home, and about safety. Once the circle was complete, she pulled out her knife. It was small, but a good metal, with a decoration of a pentagram on it, which Eridan had bought her once as a gift. She treasured it. With the room as cleansed as it would ever be, she began to hack every single fungus she could get her hands on to bits, cutting head from stalk, gouging pits in the wood floor where she thought spores might have buried, tearing holes in her bed sheets. The process took many hours. She continued babbling words of security and comfort and home and purity to herself the whole time. Once the ritual was over and the room looked absolutely trashed but fungus-free (she had been stuffing them in garbage bags and chucking them into the hallway, god only knows what she would do with the bags) she broke the circle, blew out the candle, poured the rest of the  river water onto the floor, shut the window (it was cold) and the proceeded to throw away most of her belongings. Not much could be saved if it had come from natural materials or was porous at all.

Her bed sheets and mattress went. Her desk had to be taken apart and thrown out. The plants that had been growing in her room had to go. So did many of her clothes.

And the books she had been collecting for decades.

It was what she had to do, after all.

Fire codes outlawed bonfires in the suburbs. She drug it all to the shared dumpster and tossed whatever she could lift in there, stacking the rest up by the side.

She slept on a couch in the living room that night, afraid to take chances. Just because she worked her ass off trying to get rid of the spores didn’t necessarily mean they would be gone, and she knew that. Fungus were nearly impossible to eradicate even with the proper supplies, their roots could be anywhere and they infected the whole of everything they touched.

She went to sleep with visions of a black root systems creeping throughout the whole of her house, in the floors, in the walls, binding the insulation, snarling around the wires, crunching on the concrete, and, eventually, finding its way into the earth beneath her.

-

Rose looked at her fingers, pondering.

They were long. They were roots. They were pale, and they sought the black earth, twisting.

Rose combed her roots through the skies, shifting, and looking, like a whale in the ocean, which pulled the water into its jaws as it swam, looking for sustenance.

Rose’s tail, Rose’s legs, Rose’s train, drug heavily behind her, like a wedding dress. She felt it rustle against the floors of space; those little invisible fabrics which she, with her claws, could cut through, tiny sewing scissors, and use the threads for her little dolls, to tie them up in a web or sew little eyes on.

Rose would tie a thread around earth. She would pull.

Rose saw her eyes in the mirror-seas of earth, past the mystifying clouds, and wondered what exactly she was.

And then she saw herself, clinging somewhere to the side of her massive form, grafted, attached, like the little parasitic mate of the angler fish.

-

And Rose woke up to the sound of her phone calling. She stared at it blearily, but did not pick it up.

Silence descended again. She felt like her limbs, falling haphazardly on the couch, could never move again. She was paralyzed. She was now only a part of a greater, vaster, older, more horrific existence. It fed off her, she fed off it. Why be dismayed? Dependence was a respected thing in the world of nature. Fungi could not live without death to eat, and many bacteria needed a body to devour in order to survive. Think of the virus, which cannot reproduce without perverting another cell to its purpose. And nature allows all this. Nature allows hoards of it, invisible, in number vaster than the human mind can count. If Rose was a parasite now, alive only through communion with her Host, she had good company.

Her phone rang again. She ignored it again. She couldn’t see how she could pick it up. She couldn’t move by herself.

All her thoughts went back to one great mind, who used it for its vast, world-ending plans. She was connected, in every way, to the Horror. It would be her life, once it found her, and bind her up, roots to her heart, roots to her lungs, roots to her stomach, making its digestion into hers, becoming her sustenance, becoming her mind. She had been waiting a long time, after all. She would have just joined earth in the same way if she had died here. Sooner or later, her flesh would become part of a greater consumption, and her brain aid another mind, devoured for its knowledge.

When the phone rang the third time, Rose, in another part of her mind, remembered that three is a good number. She pressed the call button and stared at the phone. She forgot to say hello.

“Rose? Are you there? Hey, Rose, still alive? Don’t tell me you’re sleeping, it’s like, noon!!”

“Vriska, you are still a morning person.”

“Yeah, that hasn’t changed. That will never change. The early bird catches the worm, Rose!! Look, we don’t have time. We have to do this tonight!!”

“Okay?”

“You were actually asleep?”

“Kind of.”

“Well. The house you wanted? The old Professor’s house? We got LUCKY. The family that owns it is on vacation, RIGHT NOW, but they won’t be for long. Our best chance to score some of Scratch’s stuff is to go TONIGHT and spend our time rustling through the goods when we know no one will be there.”

“Now? Tonight? Are you serious?” Rose asked, still disoriented.

“YES! Don’t you understand how lucky we were Rose?? This was obviously meant to be! We have to do the break in tonight, and I won’t take no for an answer! Dress warm, don’t worry about supplies, I’ll already have everything! We’ll meet at midnight, start at one, since it’s better to do these things when people are well and truly asleep, where do you want to meet?”

Rose struggled to remember anything that was vaguely near Scratch’s old house. “Um…”

“The bar on Courtly Road, I agree, sounds AWESOME. They’re open all night, too, you don’t have to worry about them closing on us. Be there by midnight, Rose!! If you’re late, I am seriously dumping your ass, and you will never hear the end of it!”

“…okay…”

“Will you be there, Rose?”

“Yes.”

Vriska hung up.

Rose seemed to be on the floor of her living room. She was lying flat on her back, staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t entirely sure how she had gotten there, but something like that wasn’t going to bother her. She pulled herself up, joint by joint, examining how many hurt, scrutinizing her skin for discoloration, for puncture marks, for bulges, hives, welts, or entry wounds.

She only found bruises. It was starting to bother her. She couldn’t pretend that nothing in her dreams or visions was real… so where did all the bodily harm inflicted in those dreams go? Were they only visions sent to her mind? That seemed unlikely, since the Horrorterror had proven its physical link to her by sending the spore-infected liquid through her digestive system.

Like always, she took a shower when she woke up. She looked down at the bones showing beneath her skin, and wondered if she still had a scale to weigh herself, but decided not to try. She was sick of losing so much to this thing. She didn’t need proof that she was losing her physical self too.

She ate a lunch of lazily made pancakes with chips that ended up to be butterscotch, not chocolate, doused in melted margarine. She cleaned her plate and sat back down with her cup of earl grey. She stared at the table.

She had a full day of nothing to do before she met up with Vriska.

Normally, she would study her books. She had just thrown out most of her books the day before. Some were still sitting scattered around the living room, she supposed… but she just felt hurt when she looked at them, knowing they were all that was left.

She guessed that when she used to have lots of free time, she would go walking, or visit her friends, or watch movies, or… play the violin. Did she still have a violin?

Rose continued to stare at the table. She remembered when she was a teenager and the experience of dealing with the concept of universal pointlessness and amorality was creeping up on her for the first time. She remembered how she used to lie on her back in bed and stare at the white ceiling for hours and do absolutely nothing. It wasn’t exactly pleasant. There was just nothing else to do when nothing else was worthwhile. Dumping newborn nihilism onto a person's hobbies had the same effect as dumping the contents of a dustpan onto dinner. There was still food there, but why scrape all the shit away to get to it?

Rose thought about what to do and why she didn’t want to do anything for three hours. During those three hours, birds flew by the window, people’s voices around the neighborhood faded in and out, and a mob immeasurable of flies flew past her one by one. There are a lot of flies when you just watch them.

Then, Rose was walking up the stairs, mindful of the blood swimming in her head, to see if her old violin was still hidden somewhere. She felt a little dull and dizzy, like a person does right before fainting, and the experience of touching things with her hands was disconcerting. “You’re depersonalizing, Rose,” she told herself, stumbling into the unused guest bedroom where she kept much of her stuff in boxes. As usual, without a teacher there behind the desk, knowing the right answer to the question of ‘why’ did nothing.

In short, she finally found the violin after some struggling and shifting under a pile of its own music. She cleaned the almost golden surface of dust, she worried over the state of the strings and the horsehair in the bow, she dabbed resin here and there, she tapped the frame and listened to the old, familiar, hallow sound of wood bent in secret ways to make magic like a spell.

She began to wonder if breaking the silence was a good idea. She was in hiding, after all. And she wasn’t sane enough to really believe that nothing could be risen from its slumber by the sound of a violin playing.

“I just told Eridan that I wasn’t really hiding anymore,” said Rose to herself. “It’s got me. I’m hoping for a miracle now. Honestly.” Her face screwed up more than she expected. “I’m doomed now, okay? I’m doomed. This is it. I’m staring at the end. Who cares what I do? Who cares if I play the violin and call up spirits? You shouldn’t care, Rose. It doesn’t matter what you do anymore.” Rose waited. “Too bad you don’t feel like doing anything.”

Rose stroked her fingers down her strings, and made slipping, buzzing noises with her nails. She plucked at the little taps on the violin’s head until her nail-screeches were in tune to the key of C. “Why bother, though?” she said. “Why not play it massively out of tune? Here’s my Requiem, it makes ears bleed if you listen to it. Here’s my final dirge, it sounds like I scratched it out on my death bed, it sounds like I don’t care any longer, it sounds like I don’t even want to sound nice and sweet any longer, it sounds like I want to scream, and I’m playing for old deaf men in a cathedral sniffling and shuffling. Don’t be so picky, it doesn’t matter if everything is perfect. No one is listening. No one cares if you’re perfect. No one is going to give you a gold star if you are. No one’s there. You’re about to be dead and no one is going to hear what’s going to happen. No one is here. No one will hear."

Rose tuned the instrument perfectly. She wanted to play something familiar and easy. There was a song she had used to warm up when she used to dream about playing professionally. She had memorized this song not jsut in her mind, but in her muscles, and she could never get it wrong. 

She had been taught how to play by an old church woman who hummed hymns to herself while she walked. For a while, all she had taught Rose was the melodies of church songs, praising virtue and perfection, to be used as practice in achieving perfect tone. Rose played the one she had perfected. It is called It Is Well, and it was written by a man whose wife and daughters had drowned in a storm. /p>

She hit the first note as a chord, just to feel her fingers pressing on the strings, and held it, scraped back and forth, and let the music pour like a waterfall until the room was full. And then she began.

“When peace like a river attendeth my way…” she muttered to herself, refinding the notes with a bit of difficulty. “when sorrows like sea billows roll…”

And then she stopped singing, because she was only playing the violin, and only thinking about the violin. She kept the notes long and low, kept the tune slow and steady, so that she wouldn’t fail after all these years. The tune had always been simple. It was the feeling she wanted back. The notes were supposed to slowly creep onto her like waves, one flowing over the other, each combining, each building, each taking inspiration from a deep sea of musical emotion, none complicated, but profound together, and like Ariel, she was supposed to find her music upon the waters, moving slowly, moving deeply, changing only slightly from note to note, falling like an unceasing rain. Her bow moved languidly, the tune slowed more and more as she spend her time drawing out each note as a longer, higher, wider, darker, more crashing wave.

The shore—what she thought of as the shore—was engulfed, and she was like a person totally soaked by the rain, who doesn’t want or need to run inside anymore. She made the chorus into a string of chords, and put as much tension as she could into the seconds before the resolution, like a tidal wave about to break itself all over the land. She pretended her notes were flowing from all the way within the deep sea, from the place where great, giant, pale, tentacle things grew in isolation, from the place where the heat of the troubled earth split the rock into rifts to scream out superheated water, and from the place where things that grew up without the sun made their own light, where things without spines or eyes live voicelessly in the dark forever, and with such inspiration the music buried all else.

Rose played the chorus five or six time. “It is well… it is well…” her violin repeated, as a mantra. She began to throw in flourishes off the beat, accents, and extra details, she began to throw in complications, the uncertainty around the feeling, the sand between her toes, the little currents in the deep waters, began to expound, really, on what the problem was. Not the great, languishing feeling of the deep, or the kraken-like monster, but all the little, stupid, gritty things that came with it. The little, biting, stupid teeth.

And then one of the old, stressed-out strings snapped beneath her nails.

The second-to-last chord rang around the room for perhaps half a minute, like the echoes of a great crash.

-

Rose showed up for her date with Vriska looking, if she said so herself, fantastic. She did not at all dress warm, as Vriska had requested, she dressed well, in a dark purple dress over black tights and black boots, with her hair bound up on the back of her head and long lace gloves on her hands. She looked about as out of place in the bar as an ostrich would have, but she absolutely did not care. Seeing Vriska roll her eyes in familiar frustration was worth it.

“Rose, if you snag your lacy bullshit dress oh a chain-link fence tonight, it’s your own damn fault and I’m leaving you to deal with it.”

“If I have an opportunity to snag my dress on a chain-link fence tonight, you have not done your job as a hired hand and I’m leaving you to deal with that.”

“I am only not making a comment about being a hired hand because we are too early in the conversation to be there yet,” Vriska told her.

“Be where, exactly?” asked Rose with a smile.

“Sit your ass down and order a goddamn drink,” Vriska said. Rose noticed that she looked a bit preoccupied, though she didn’t have a clue as to why yet. She’d have to find out. Vriska was slumped back in her chair, not drunk, but sulking, with her unbrushed black hair spilling behind the chair and over her shoulders in impressive sheaves. She wore a low-cut sweater, a sturdy canvas jacket, black jeans rolled up to reveal metal-toed work boots, and had a backpack draped on her chair, showing that she actually was taking the break-in seriously and might be miffed that Rose, to all appearances, wasn’t.

Good.

She was already drinking, too, though it looked like she hadn’t gotten through much—there was a finished beer mug in front of her that looked, from the dregs, like it had held something dark, and a small glass of something that looked like whiskey sat in front of her. “Do you really think drunk is the best state to be in right now?”

“I’m not going to be drunk, okay? I can handle my liquor well. Besides, I commit felonies better when drunk.”

“If you’re not going to be drunk, why would that matter?”

“I’m ordering Irish Car Bombs for us both next,” Vriska decided.

Rose had never had any such thing. She thought it was a college drink, and she had never drunk in college. “Well,  what have you got prepared for the expedition? Floor plans? Lock pickers?”

“Well, yeah, I had something to pick the lock with, but we don’t need a floor plan, seriously,” Vriska sighed.

“We don’t?”

Vriska shook her head as if she were extremely disappointed. “Rose, where do we live?”

“Apple Grove.”

“Exactly. We live in a cookie-cutter suburb of a gamma city birthed in the late eighties by men looking for quickly built, cheap, affordable houses. Aside from the recent diversions built by rich assholes in the Gala neighborhood, there are a total of three floor plans in Apple Grove. There’s a 33% chance that Scratch’s house is identical to yours, just with different furniture strewn about.”

Rose considered that. “That doesn’t help us know where he may have hidden things.”

“It does too. Take a moment and ponder where you would hide things in your own house.”

Rose pondered. The books were just behind other books in the bookshelf. Her knife, her chalice, all of her materials were simply laid around the house wherever they looked nice. True, she had a few things locked in the cupboards… but the skull…

“What can I get you two ladies?” asked a smooth, flirtatious voice.

Vriska looked up with a smile, Rose frowned. “Do you make Kir?” she asked.

“Do we make what?”

“Irish bar bombs for both of us,” Vriska declared. “Start with two. You want anything to eat, Rose?”

“No.”

“Well, whatever. I’ve already ordered a whole damn sausage pizza, you’re welcome to share it if you want.”

And so the drinking began. Rose knew better to be drunk with her stomach, so despite the fact that it was the opposite of what she should do with an Irish car bomb, she sipped at it. When the pizza came, she poked at a single slice. Vriska had no such inhibitions about either. “It’s cold tonight,” she rationalized, “you want to be warm and well-fed.”

“Are you taking this seriously at all?”

“You’re a pissy drunk, I knew you would be.”

“I’m not drunk at all.”

“Yeah, seriously, are you going to drink that?”

“I think I’ll ask them for white wine instead.”

Vriska sighed. “Lalonde, you are IMPOSSIBLE. Look, I’ll show you how seriously I am taking this.” Vriska opened her black backpack, and dumped several objects on the table. “Here’s my all-purpose lock pick, fashioned by myself. Here’s my all-purpose welder, for when the lock pick fails me.”

“You have a welder?”

“And you thought I didn’t take these things seriously,” Vriska grinned. “What did I go to college for, Rose?”

“Theatre.”

“Theatre work. I did prop work, costume work, and set work. As well as special effects. I just happened to steal some of the most important machinery from the prop shop in the process.”

“And you never felt any pangs of conscience whatsoever?” asked Rose with some interest. Vriska’s ability to reason away anything she could have possibly done wrong was fascinating to her.

“Rose, you studied LITERATURE. You’ve seen the money they charge for pointless fucking degrees. They stole from me first.”

“Maybe they use that money to buy welders?”

“Please, I know how much these things cost, and it’s not thirty grand a year.”

“I’m not totally sure that that’s where the money—”

“And these are my lovely, all-purpose surgical gloves, as well as my cleaning kit to get rid of anything fucking resembling hair and fingerprints. But we won’t need to use them anyway, because we will leave everything perfectly in order in that place, right? In and out like a little fly, and not a spider’s thread disturbed.”

“I’ve never seen black surgical gloves before.”

“I ordered them especially for me.”

“Well, it makes sense, since you’d have to use them around black hair dye so often, I’d assume.”

Vriska finished her second car bomb. “Wow, I really can’t say anything without you bitching. Is it a natural talent, or do you work at it? Here, I’ll say something, try to bitch: Rose, I actually love your dress, it looks awesome on you.”

“Why would you go through such lengths to prove I have a bad character?”

“See? There you are.” Vriska extracted another piece of pizza with a sigh, leaning back in her chair. “And you do, by the way. You have a terrible character. Yeah, you point out things that are true about myself. I’m conniving. I’m cold. I’m a drain on society. I’ll amount to nothing and end up in jail like the street trash I am and end up frittering away everything left in my soul in prison gangs. Do you think I don’t know that? But you know that most people wouldn’t say those things to watch my reaction, right? I see your eyes light up.” Vriska leaned forward again, perching her thin chin on her folded hands, fingers laced and sticking up like a dead spider’s legs. “It’s not every day you meet an actual sadist, is what I’m saying.”

Rose was silent.

“Well, most people don’t. You’re my second. And I’m not talking about Eridan. That poor kid doesn’t enjoy the pain, I promise you. Well, he enjoys the pain it causes in him. It’s stupidly complicated.”

“Who was the first?”

“Sadist? Never you mind. I didn’t handle him like I handle you, sadly.”

“How do you handle me?”

Vriska glared. “I motherfucking confront you. You take a swipe at me, I block it. What does it matter if you’re telling the truth about my awful, stupid, bad seed soul? So am I. I match you. You try to strike me, I strike back. We could go one of two ways, Rose. You could get tired of hitting at me, or you could start hitting hard. Cause I don’t get tired.”

“So is this the reason you’re so vehement about keeping our feelings out of our relationship?” Rose cocked her head to the side. “Ignoring the fact that you manage to talk about our feelings and our relationship every time I meet you.”

“If you start really going at me, really fucking going at me, I want it to be an act of passion,” Vriska said, sounding more subdued than she had been. “A relationship can go downhill slowly, get worse and worse, the blows just keep getting harder, I’ve seen that. Like a bad movie that just keeps disappointing its own potential. Or it can explode, and that’s lovely.”

“Like a bad action film that exists only to stimulate?”

Vriska decided that this was the time to stick out her tongue at Rose. “Well, go have a French art film with Eridan, then. I won’t stop you. I’ll be busy shooting a machine gun at ex-KGB agents while smoking a Cuban cigar to add insult to injury.”

Rose took a good swig of her drink for the first time that evening, to have a second to mull over her thoughts. “Is that what you want? A sparring partner? Is that really what you want from me?”

“Yeah.” Vriska extended her arms. “So, what, a bitch can’t have what she wants? I just don’t want you to waste your potential on a petty, typical relationship when you can do so much more.”

“Like what?” Rose asked.

Vriska cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m serious. Like what? What sort of potential do you see in me?”

“What a weird expression to say that with.”

“What are you trying to get out of me?”

“What do you have?”

Rose felt like a house being explored by a cat burglar. She wasn’t sure why she was smiling. “What are you looking for?”

Vriska thought. It was something that Rose didn’t make happen a lot. She suddenly regretted that it was happening. “You ever looked deep into a drain on the side of the road?”

“No.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. No one does. We instinctually avoid them. Do you know what you’d find there?”

“No.”

“Yes you do.”

Vriska’s third drink arrived. The conversation took a quick and spectacular turn for the mundane.


	4. Chapter 4

They arrived at the site of the house at an ungodly hour, which suited Rose perfectly. The suburban street was dark, between country-dark and city-dark, not brightened but clarified by occasional streetlamps. It was a cloudless night, but the moon was gone, so she and Vriska slipped unseen from roadside to roadside on their progress.

The house was on the slope of a hill, bordered with clear-cut, rectangular bushes full of thorns facing the streets and young, leafless trees in the even lawn. The house was mostly grey, but had a black front door. There were lights on inside, but Vriska assured Rose that they were only on to throw thieves off the trail.

“It doesn’t seem to be working then,” Rose commented.

“Any thief knows everything that people do to throw thieves off,” Vriska explained. “Sure, sometimes it works, because why fuck with a house full of spotlights and alarm systems, but it also tells us where the really good stuff is.”

“Will we be fucking with alarm systems?” asked Rose discontentedly.

“I’m not sure, but we might be.” Vriska did a quick, circling perusal of the yard and the street before it, and was pleased by how empty they were. “Ah, the only reason I ever liked suburbia.”

“That is?”

“No one is here. They’re all behind their doors, hiding. You’re always alone because all the people are buried in their boxes.”

“You wouldn’t be able to guess what happens in some of those boxes,” Rose murmured.

“Oh, I know there are some weird things going on behind the picket fences. There’s a house in Shady Acres that runs an honest to god speakeasy. But you’d never know. And they’ll never tell, because you’ll never see them. They might not exist, except for the lights in their windows.”

“Isolated people?”

Vriska motioned for Rose to follow her onto the sidewalk leading up to the house. “They all are. We’re in one of the only subcultures in the world where ‘isolated’ IS normal, you know. Mom used to not let me talk to the neighbors.”

“I never talk to my neighbors either.”

“Well, that’s just you, Rose, seriously,” Vriska muttered. “Hope to fuck they don’t have dogs, I hate it when they have dogs.” She glanced around the front door with distaste. “Alright, there’s nothing that SAYS they have an alarm system… usually they’ll advertise, you know, to show off how impregnable their fortress is and shit.”

“Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing.”

“Of course. But you know what, I think we’re gonna be lucky.” Vriska grinned and pulled out her lockpicker.

“So you just open the door and we walk in? Really?”

“Sure.”

“What if there actually is an alarm system?”

“We run for it like we’re on fire and make a better plan later.”

“Vriska…”

“Don’t worry, I’m feeling lucky.”

“You’re feeling tipsy,” Rose sighed.

“When I say ‘lucky,’ I don’t mean ‘oblivious to the danger and falsely assured by my stupidity,’” Vriska said. When Rose didn’t look too reassured, she waved her hand and continued, “It takes a long time to get these things installed, and they didn’t move in long ago. Come on, have a little faith.”

“For faith is believing in what we do not see,” Rose intoned, lifting her hands reverently.

“Shut up, you.”

They found themselves inside without too much trouble. No alarms screamed at them, no lights suddenly switched on, no one jumped up in the other room. Rose was about to let her breath out when she heard the sound of claws on hard floor.

“Dog,” Vriska sighed. “Great. Dog. Stand back, Rose, you’ll probably scare it.”

“By doing what?”

“Animals probably hate you,” Vriska said, thought she didn’t divulge how she knew that.

The dog scrambled into the front hall, already barking. It was medium-sized, short haired, and to Rose, frankly threatening. But Vriska instantly dropped to her knees, held out her hands, and turned on her charm so suddenly that Rose could swear she saw a lever being flipped. Her eyes softened, her chin tilted, her hands opened into a giving position. “Hey, little puppy,” Vriska crooned, and the dog tilted its head to the side for a second, before deciding that Vriska Serket was certainly a nice person. Vriska scratched the dog’s head thoroughly, praising it in a voice that sounded sincerely delighted.

“It’s a good sign, actually,” Vriska said, laughing a little as the dog sniffed at her face, “if they left the dog over, they probably have a pet sitter walking in normally, so no one will be too damn freaked out by intrusions. Boy, you’re a big, spineless, family lapdog, aren’t you, yes you are!”

The dog seemed to agree with this estimation wholeheartedly. “I would find a treat for you, but I’m not risking you leaving part of it uneaten,” Vriska decided. “But you deserve one for making this so damn easy, dumbass.”

“Can we leave the dog to be ineffectual by itself?” Rose sighed. “I’d like to search the house BEFORE dawn.”

“It’s all so cute,” Vriska sighed, instead of doing anything remotely useful. “A bunch of kids, a nice house, but nothing at all to guard it except what might as well be a fucking guard hamster. What if I were here to do more than aid the nerd mafia in their book-stealing activities?”

“I wouldn’t talk too loud,” Rose said flatly, “The walls have ears, and Captor knows when he’s been insulted.”

Vriska grimaced. “Okay, the only person I want to talk about less than I want to talk about Ampora is Captor. What the fuck is his problem.”

“I thought the only person you wanted to talk less about than Ampora was Pyrope.”

“Well, let’s look for your dumb diary,” Vriska said, giving the dog one last pat on the head. “Does Sollux actually lead your nerd mafia, though?”

“No, we’ve started a gang war of sorts. Unavoidable, when he began to consider science fiction real literature.”

“Oh my god.”

“The old ways must be maintained.”

“Shut up, Rose. Can you give me a clearer picture of what we’re looking for?”

“Maybe. I’m hunting for something that I only hope exists, I remind you. A record of sorts. So that could look like any sort of book- a little pocketbook, a leather-bound portfolio, a simple notebook… the only thing that will identify it is its location in a hidden place.”

“Why do you think it would be in this house?” Vriska walked down the hall and into the living room, looking around with uncharacteristically careful eyes.

“His death was very sudden, and very unexpected,” said Rose. “I am almost certain of foul play. If he was hiding something in the house that no one else knew about and movers wouldn’t find, no one would be able to remove it.”

Vriska rounded on Rose slowly. “So this is a little more serious than you’ve been pretending.”

“Yes.”

“Are you wrapped up in circles that I’ve already had time with?”

“No.”

“Cool, then,” Vriska shrugged. “But since this is for serious, remember I have some experience. If things really go to shit…”

Rose put up a hand, and Vriska dropped the subject with a nod. “Why do you think this record exists?”

“Everyone in his profession has one.”

Vriska shrugged. “Sure, alright. What sort of content should I be looking for?”

Rose was silent.

Vriska looked over her shoulder at Rose, raising an eyebrow. The shadows in the unlit living room made her expression all but invisible, but since it was schooled anyway, it could have been a mask to Rose. When Vriska’s hissing voice was hushed, the house was dead except for faint buzzing from deep below and one low-toned, ticking clock. It was an atmosphere of discomfort. “I’ll have to look at any notebooks we’ll find anyway. I’ll see something.”

“It would look like nonsense to you.”

“Well, what sort of nonsense am I looking for? Will it even be in English?”

“Probably some of it will.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. Rose could see their whites appearing and disappearing in the darkness. She stretched her arms above her head. “Alright, time to sort through the house looking for incredibly important semi-english nonsense, then. I know what places in this sort of house are structurally shaky, so I’ll look in those places, and you can spend your time reading your fucking tarot cards for the answer or whatever.”

“I haven’t done Tarot since high school, but I don’t remember there being any ‘it’s in the sock drawer’ cards.” Rose did start thinking anyway. With something as important as a Grimoire, Scratch wouldn’t just hide it behind a picture frame or something equally easy to guess at. He would find some way to put it inside the walls. Or some way to bury in the garden. Whatever way he found, he had to not only be assured that no one else could ever find it, but also that he could access it quickly and often. Somehow, it had to be completely hidden from sight but easy for him to find.

“Not from sight,” Rose muttered, “hidden from mind. Somewhere a person would never think of.”

Vriska had already disappeared, and the sound of claws followed her. Rose began to wander slowly around the house, observing all she could. The light was bad, and spilled unevenly on the contours of furniture and scattered children’s toys, and Rose found it hard to not be swept away by melancholy thoughts. There are places in the world not really meant to be seen without people.

She heard some shuffling and banging upstairs, and the low but satisfying sounds of Vriska growling to herself. Rose decided to finally take her destined place in the horror movie of her life and headed straight for the basement.

The basement was guarded by a wooden door and fenced with identical wooden railings. Rose felt for a light switch, and was almost disappointed when bright, well-spaced light bulbs instantly lit up the whole basement. It was a wide, unfinished room, with cold concrete floors and bare boards for a ceiling. There were boxes and old chairs stacked here and yonder, and at the very end of the room, two doors, both closed, but neither locked. The room was more full of dust than it was useful objects—it wasn’t even used for storage, and Rose could tell, from a feeling, that the children weren’t around down here. She gave the room a few short glances, but figured unless Scratch had actually opened up the ventilation system, this room wasn’t a likely hiding place. Sure, it would be hard to steal something from the windowless, cluttered room, but it was just the wrong place for a Grimoire. A Grimoire needs its own, secret place, unshared by mundane materials.

Perhaps it didn’t. But ti should be treated like it was a unique object. She didn’t know anyone who wouldn’t go to excess for their Grimoire, whether they had to or not.

The first of the two hidden doors was a mostly empty guest bedroom occupied only by a bed frame and a chest of drawers. Rose searched, but she couldn’t find any place the walls or the floor had been disturbed. They were the obvious places for a Grimoire to her—in the bones of the house, beneath the flesh, in the area that is essential yet unused. Soon enough, she walked into the next room, and found Vriska standing there, waiting, peering still into the darkness.

“Did you feel something?” Rose whispered.

Vriska stared at her accusingly.

It was a boiler room. The water heater, air conditioning system, and air heating system all stood cluttered with each other, with spider webs stretched between, humming and hissing. The light in that room, and that room alone, was dead.

“Here,” Vriska said, with uncharacteristic reluctance.

“It must be,” Rose agreed.

“How do we know?” Vriska asked. She put up her hands the second after she asked. “No, don’t tell me. I think I know why.”

Rose smiled. “You’re taking it well.”

“I don’t faint away from impossible things just because they’re impossible,” Vriska said, after just one heavy breath. “Just because it doesn’t make any damn sense doesn’t mean it can’t be real. Ugh. Great. You fucked me up in some sort of occult bullshit.”

“You volunteered. Help me search.”

Vriska bent down to check the floors, just as Rose had in the last room. Rose wandered around, trying to get a better look at the corners of the room. “He couldn’t have possibly put something into the pipes,” Vriska muttered to herself, “there’s no reason to break into the metal just to hide a damn book… and besides, that would obviously ruin it.”

“He could wrap it up to protect it.”

“Still, there’s no reason to axe his way into the damn pipes!”

“There’s already a way in.”

Vriska stopped pawing at the wallpaper to turn and look at what Rose had been staring at for some time, her eyes wide and her face still. “You’re joking.”

“I might be wrong.”

“No you’re not, and you know you’re not. Shit. I’m not prepared for this.” Vriska narrowed her eyes at the water boiler. “Turning it off and waiting for the water to cool… I don’t even know how long that would take, but what could I possibly use to grab in there… okay, I think we have two obvious options.”

“They are?”

”Either we run hot water through every tap in the house, depleting all the hot water in the boiler, and giving us a cold tank to reach into…”

“Shall I just call the police now?”

“Or I take advantage of the fact that I have a false arm and pull the book out of there myself.”

Rose pondered. “Wouldn’t that hurt you?”

“Well, it’s plastic, and plastic doesn’t conduct heat,” Vriska said, rolling her eyes.

“All the same, you’d be leaning over a boiling tank of water which is… let me check, a full fifty gallon tank, I think. Perhaps less, it’s not so large.”

“Well, do you have any brilliant plans? Any idea what magic the old Prof used to fish it out?”

“He wouldn’t be the sort to just never turn it on… and he did have to fetch it often…” Rose mused. “He must have used some trick.”

“Until you figure that out, I’m going to use MY trick. Turn it off, okay? And then help me screw this top off.”

Soon enough, the two women were peering into a cauldron of dark, shimmering water, in which something, wrapped up in shining plastic like a clutch of eggs, floated in the deep. “That has to be it,” Vriska said, sounding excited. “What do you know, sounds like you had a good idea, Rose.”

“Yes, I had one of those, and you definitely don’t. Plastic can melt, you know, and there were probably metal wires—“

“Shush.”

“And do you really have a very articulate grip with that hand?”

“Can it,” said Vriska, and plunged her arm into the water. Her face grew into a pained grimace very quickly, and she had to lean in much, much farther than Rose figured was healthy, staining her shoulder and a bit of her chest red, but her mechanical arm closed around the package lurking in the water, seized it, and pulled it into the air.

Drops of seething water came up with it, making Rose wince. It was a brown leather book wrapped in some heavy protective material, keeping the water from touching it. Vriska grinned at it triumphantly for a second, grinning sharply, as a thin tendril of steam rose form around her.

“My god, you just did that,” Rose said.

Vriska dropped the package on the cold ground, and turned away to fiddle with her false arm, hissing. Rose took the moment to reseal the water heater and turn it back on. “I really cannot believe you just did that.”

“No blood, no guts, no glory.”

Rose knelt down by the book. It was still warm to the touch, but cooling rapidly, so she peeled the protective material off of the leather. The inside cover, perfectly dry, bore the seal of Scratch’s library. And the first page was emblazoned with an intricate sigil of warding and binding. Rose’s heart quickened. “This is it.”

“So,” said Vriska, back still turned, “how did I know it was there? Is there a simple explanation?”

“Hm.” Rose tapped her fingernail against the cover of the Grimoire. “Humans are animals.”

“Yeah.”

“Animals know when something is wrong.” Rose tapped the cover of the book more firmly. “This is wrong.”

“So I knew that the guy’s book was in a water boiler by instinct?” groaned Vriska. “Really? That’s your explanation?”

“You asked for something simple.”

“Yeah, I asked for simple, not bullshit.” Vriska finally turned around, live arm cradling her burnt shoulder. She was glowering. “Got anything better?”

Rose flipped calmly through the pages of the Grimoire. Black ink, strange stains, and spots of wax concealing designs better hidden.   Rose found a page full of circles and signs, and turned it towards Vriska, over her own face. “Do you feel it?”

“By ‘it,’ do you mean the same feeling I feel when looking at a doll left sitting on the chair alone with too-big eyes and a limp neck?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

Vriska stooped down to peer more closely at the page, and Rose let her. She could feel the heat radiating off of her body. Vriska worried her lips with her teeth, and narrowed her eyes. “What does it do.”

“It’s describing something, actually. This page is just narrative.”

“What is it describing?”

“A demon, I suppose.”

“You suppose.”

“There are better words.”

“So now you’re sort of saying… this creeped me out because it was magic? I dunno, I’m kind of a cynic.” Vriska lifted the fingers of her live hand to the page.

“No, because there’s something in it to creep you out. Since this is a book of… well, magic, there are bits of demonic beings tied into it. Part of their soul, I guess. Scratch uses their power to do his work. Or he did. The book frightened you because it is part demon, and you are a human.”

Vriska seemed to take this in stride. She looked more like she was listening to the plot of a far-fetched video game that to a summation of the new events of her life, but she took it in stride all the same. “And you?”

“And I?”

“Yeah. You.”

“Also part… demon.”

“And also part human.”

“Still part human.”

“So does the book scare you?”

Rose turned the pages to her own eyes. She traced a few spirals with her sight, and read the words in the center. “You know how you feel when you watch a horror movie? Scared, thrilled, delighted?”

“Turned on?”

“What?”

Vriska considered her answer perhaps more carefully than she had to. She smiled. “Well, you were always pretty fond of books.”

“Horror movies turn you on? I can’t even be surprised.” Rose put a hand on her chest and sighed. “Vriska, you are a degenerate.”

“All of horror is pretty sexy to me,” Vriska chuckled, flicking a page of Rose’s book aside. “All sorts of thrills, something always waiting to get you. You never know what will happen. I like the danger.”

“The danger, huh?” Rose repeated, leaning in close to Vriska. “Oh, like ‘bite me, Mr. Cullen, I trust you not to devour me whole?’”

“Less like ‘bite me’ and more like ‘trick me into a dark, cold basement in an abandoned house with no chance of anyone coming to help me’,” Vriska murmured, moving her finger slowly up the spine of the book and just to the edge of Rose’s hand, where delicate skin stretched from her thumb to her forefinger, “and then hunt me down.”

“Do you like the part where you get your eyes pulled out of their sockets by sensitive little hands as well?”

“Rose,” said Vriska, who was tracing the inside of Rose’s wrist, where her veins pumped, “you’re weird.”

“And you went into a dark, cold basement with me. Well, well, maybe I’m not the one making bad decisions tonight.”

“This is totally your version of dirty talk, isn’t it? It totally is.”

Rose moved rather close to Vriska’s face, peering up at her from below, like a cat looking up at a bird. “You’re the one who told me she likes danger.”

Vriska bit her lip.

“I hope you like the danger of the police as well, because I hear someone outside.”

Realization hit Vriska’s eyes after a few seconds of baffled lust. “Son of a bitch! In the middle of the night? If it’s another damn thief sizing up my house, I am socking them one, noise be damned.” Vriska jumped up, tossing her backpack onto her shoulders. Rose stood more delicately, holding the Grimoire to her chest. Its discovery had made her more bold than she should have been, and she knew it, but watching Vriska become absorbed with fear was its own reward, as usual. She grew so sharp when terrified.

“You weren’t fucking with me, someone is outside,” Vriska growled under her breath. “Could someone possibly know? I guess someone could have heard. Could have heard, and then called someone. Shit. I was so close to having the easiest run of my life.”

“Nothing wrong with taking things hard,” Rose smiled.

“Hard and fast, if you want to get out of this without seeing a jail cell,” Vriska retorted. “I’m going to get to the nearest exit. You will follow right behind me and you won’t do any magic bullshit.”

“What if the bullshit helps our predicament?”

“I read my fucking fairy tales as a kid, only way you’ll do a magical favor for me is if you get my immortal soul in return.”

“Temping,” Rose purred, “sounds delicious.”

Vriska shot Rose a complicated glare that was perhaps summarizing the sentence ‘that was both weird and kind of hot, and I would like you to do more of it later, but can it please wait for five fucking minutes.’ She then put her hood over her head and slipped out of the heating room and into the basement. Rose dutifully followed her, enjoying the feeling of slipping into the shadows. Vriska hid herself in corners as she worked her way up the stairs, trying to rush ahead of the voices, which were still outside, but rising in pitch. Rose was commanded with pointing fingers, tipped with red polish, to close every door behind them, and she did so, as quietly as if she were just flipping the pages of a book.

Everything went well until a very excited dog saw its two new friends making a jogging break for the back door.

It barked loudly when it saw Vriska, and Vriska made the facial equivalent of loud cursing. Someone shouted outside that they were sure someone was in there, and someone else shouted thief, and Vriska sighed, shrugged, and began running.

The back door, which Vriska forced upon with minimal lock picking and maximum muscle strength, led out onto a patio surrounded by a lovely flower garden. Vriska told Rose to not fucking bother shutting this one, they might be lucky and somehow have all of Rose’s other fingerprints missed if only she doesn’t mark up this door.

“Magical bullshit would be of most excellent help right now,” Rose giggled.

“Fuck no,” Vriska said, and began sprinting.

The lights spaced out throughout the well-clipped yard followed her as she went, alerting everyone out front to her form darting across the grass. “Oh, fuck DAMMIT,” Vriska roared, turning quickly down a dark street as several civilians poured out from either side of the house to follow her as best they could manage.

“We’ve left so much fucking EVIDENCE,” Vriska groaned.

“They won’t find anything missing.”

“They don’t care if anything is missing; I know how these suburban bastards work! They whack off to watching petty criminals being dragged into the station. All that matters is that a crime HAS been committed, so they won’t go back to their peaceful rest in their glass sunrooms until they know some other unfortunate kid is getting shit.”

“Dreadful.”

“Like beasts on the trail, they are,” Vriska puffed. “Shadenfreude is their food, and it runs in the blood of anyone with a weird hair color or too many piercings.”

“I could give them a better taste, if pain’s what they want.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and for the last time, NO.”

Vriska forgot herself in the moment where she shouted at Rose, and answering shouts followed behind her. Swearing, Vriska turned abruptly into someone’s yard, and began dashing through the grass and across small streets to get away. But there were dogs on their heels, sent after them by the neighbors, and the dogs had understood that there was a chase and nothing more. Vriska did her best running through plants and puddles and behind houses, but eventually, she found herself growling, “will nothing fucking shake off these wolves?”

Rose turned around, and lifted up her arms.

All Vriska heard was the scared squealing of dogs, and then silence. For good measure, she kept running, slipping behind some bushes and fences until she finally found a decent alleyway to lie low in, curled in the corner, taking in deep breaths as quietly as she possibly could.

She heard nothing but the bugs of the night for several minutes, clicking, buzzing, scrabbling. The stars of the winter sky burned above her, blurry in her eye sight, appearing more and more as she adjusted to the darkness.

And then, Rose was before her.

Vriska started, and then bore her teeth. Rose was almost smiling. Her pupils were blown so wide that the black centers almost took up her whole eyes. Her arms were limp at her sides. “Shit, Lalonde,” Vriska hissed, “what happened? Are we safe?”

“Well,” said Rose, “I am.” she grinned at Vriska.

Vriska glowered in return. “Very funny, Rose. Ha, ha, my evil Satanist friend has tasted blood and she will not rest until she has spilled mine. Beware her unholy thirst. What the fuck happened to the dogs? Did anyone see you?”

“Everything is fine, and no one will come after us,” Rose promised. “The dogs live, but they’re scared witless. Everyone will be quietly intimidated into leaving the incident alone once they have decided that nothing seems to have been disturbed. Of course, it won’t be the death of their concern that causes the issue to be dropped, but their unwillingness to pick it back up. Humans are animals.”

“And animals know when something is wrong,” said Vriska, rubbing her burnt shoulder. “How deep am I in? Give me one straight answer.”

Rose knelt in front of Vriska, maybe six feet away from her, but hemming her into the alleyway. Her skirt spread out behind her, dark, disguising her form. “You’re as deep in as you want to be. No one’s going to drag you under. But if you swim out yourself…”

Vriska led out a shaking breath as, deep inside her, she slowly shifted into believing in the severity of the situation. It wasn’t a moment where her gut woke her up, screaming ‘this is real’, sending adrenaline to her nerves, it wasn’t a crushing realization, it was the voice of what might have once been a conscience and now more resembled an overworked, drunken caretaker sighing, ‘you’re in some shit, kid.’ “That couldn’t sound like any more of a trap if you were actually hiding an axe behind your back.”

Rose extended her arms to show they were empty. Except, of course, for the book held in her right hand.

“You know what’s strange?” Vriska asked.

“The uncertain nature of consciousness?”

“The way humans have chosen to react to fear. Most animals are smart enough to just run away when they know that shit is smelling sour.”

Rose cocked her head to the side.

“Humans all think, ‘hey, what if nothing is really wrong?’ and they sit there waiting as the room is slowly filled with shit. Because what if it’s weird to run away? And then you get the truly fucked up individuals who think, what will happen if I actually fucking immerse myself in shit? Because apparently at some point we went from sensible animals, who run away from monsters, to little fucking weirdoes who wonder whether monsters are also beasts in the sack. Did we forget what fear means?”

Rose bore the very tips of her white teeth. “I have sometimes wondered if the whole of human experience is explained by their rampant perversion.”

Vriska felt her own tongue on her bottom lip. Neither she nor Rose moved an inch. “So it’s pretty weird that we decided being preyed upon was sexy. It should be terrible. We all say we want to be strong.”

“It’s the curse of being the alpha predator. Fear is an exotic stimulant that we only rarely feel.”

Vriska’s heartbeat quickened. She still didn’t move towards Rose. “It’s all adrenaline. That’s why it’s so easily confused with lust.”

“Confused? The thrill of the chase doesn’t even compare to the thrill of being chased.”

Vriska resisted the urge to back up against the cold brick wall. “Does fear give you a thrill?”

“The taste of fear does,” Rose whispered. “I can taste it in my fingertips, when I touch the skin of fear, and I can feel it.” She splayed out her fingertips in front of her, as it to behold them. “The speed of the blood in your veins, and the sound of your quick breathing, and the smell of pheromones all around you—they speak to me.”

“Come here,” Vriska said.

Rose came to her, crawling.

Vriska bent her own back down to the grimy asphalt, feeling the dirt and dust grind into her hair. Rose drug her hands over Vriska’s shoulders, and her arms, and her sides, using her fingers like a sea creature uses its tentacles, finding every curve of her new meal. Vriska hissed when Rose pulled on her burnt skin, twitching and scrabbling her fingers against the street, and Rose leaned down and brushed her lips and her nose and the tips of her lidded eyelashes against the side of Vriska’s face, as if testing out how she would taste.

Vriska threaded her still living hand through Rose’s thin hair.

Rose kissed Vriska’s cheek, and her ear, and her collarbone, seeking out where her bones pressed against her skin, finding the gentle depths where skin was soft and unprotected, and began to drag her teeth wherever she found tender parts. Vriska cried out the third time Rose worried her burnt skin with her teeth. But since she also tensed her hips and her thighs and her teeth when she gasped, Rose decided to not stop hurting her.

“Are you just going to give in to me?” Rose asked, breathing against Vriska’s neck.

“I’m letting you test my fucking limits,” Vriska growled. “Push me, pull you.”

“So if I push harder?...”

Rose dug her nails into Vriska’s shoulders.

Vriska yowled, and knocked her forehead against Rose’s in a move that obviously surprised her. While Rose sat and blinked for a second, Vriska clasped her hands around Rose’s shoulders, bringing oil and grime with her, knocked Rose’s head back with a shove, and bit her neck.

Rose hissed in surprise, and bucked back against Vriska. Vriska clutched and clung to her, laughing quietly when she felt Rose struggle. “Fight harder,” she whispered. She pulled up her legs around Rose’s hips, holding her in place, rubbing her slowly.

“Is it a contest now?” Rose asked, grabbing for a hold on Vriska’s back, and pulling her clothes in the process.

“It always was,” said Vriska, and she dropped Rose, so that Rose almost hit the ground, dragging Vriska down with her. Rose grimaced when she saw the turn of position. “The contest is this: impress me.”

“The prize?” Rose asked.

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“We might be thinking of slightly different things,” said Rose with a definite glare.

Vriska lowered her body slowly, so that her face was flush with Rose’s, eyes matched to eyes. “You wanna try to eat me up? You can try.” Vriska was breathing heavily. “I’ll let you try. We’ll play beast and hunter.”

Rose bit her nose to surprise her. When Vriska yelled, she bit her bottom lip instead.

Vriska’s mouth was hot and wet, and her skin was marred with marks where she had bitten her own skin off. She used her teeth eagerly, to gnaw on Rose’s tongue, and on her little lips, and to clash with Rose’s own teeth. She chose to kiss sloppy and bite hard, working Rose backwards until she felt Rose sigh and arch slowly, slightly, delicately, like she always did, as if being turned on came upon her gently, a warn wave on the sand. Vriska bit the sides of her face, and her cheekbones, and whatever she could find, as Rose hissed and began working at Vriska’s clothing.

“You know I do better on top, don’t you,” Vriska murmured against Rose’s lips.

“Confidence becomes you,” Rose growled in return. “But I would make sure it isn’t false confidence.” She dug her fingers into the unprotected spaces between Vriska’s ribs, one side of which she knew had been injured for a long time, and listened blissfully to Vriska’s shouting.

Jerking backwards, Vriska sat back against Rose’s hips, her legs splayed on either side of her. Breathing heavily, she glared down at Rose. Looking back up, Rose slowly smiled at her. “Discouraged?”

“Considering a new angle,” Vriska said. With the very tips of her nails, she pulled Rose’s dress over her head. Rose made no protest, and helped her shrug the fabric off. She let Vriska slide her hands beneath her and scrape off her bra. Then, while re-positioning herself on Rose’s hips, Vriska pulled off her own shirt, and unhooked her bra smoothly, so it slowly fell forward, letting her breasts slip out as she leaned over Rose’s head. “Wanna eat me up, little monster?” Vriska asked.

Rose tried not to tense her thighs too obviously. “Is that the theme for the night?”

“You started it.” Vriska lowered herself onto Rose’s body, holding her breasts up with her hands so that they were directly in Rose’s view. Rose traced the slight movements of her hands. “Your eyes are still blown wide from the hunt, you know that?”

Rose tried to still her grin, but it didn’t work. To Vriska, she looked absolutely manic. Whatever new madness she had been holding back was beginning to leak out. “I can’t promise that I won’t really take a bite.”

Vriska deliberately pulled Rose’s head up from the ground and put her lips to her heart. “Eat. Me. Out,” Vriska demanded, low and growling.

Rose began to place kisses against Vriska’s breasts, grinning as she did. Vriska sighed, and then chuckled as Rose felt her way to Vriska’s nipple, pushing with her tongue to make her sigh and shudder.  

Rose bit her, and Vriska just laughed and bucked her hips, head rolling backwards. “Harder,” she demanded, “I don’t think you’re trying.”

Rose gripped Vriska around her back, pulled her down, and tried to devour her, senselessly, as if she were fighting a wall that fenced her in. She left red marks all over Vriska’s chest and stomach and ribs, as Vriska continued to laugh more and more ecstatically, peppering her laughter with moans and gasps. Rose scrabbled at the hem of Vriska’s pants with her nails, and Vriska lowered down her arm to help her pull them off. She kept laughing, hand clutching her own hair or bracing her against the street behind her back, as Rose nibbled along the insides of her thighs, sometimes biting softly, sometimes biting down and pulling, but her laughter stopped abruptly with a gasp as Rose suddenly drug her tongue along the outside of her underwear.

“Yes,” said Vriska, as her hips shook. “Ugh, yes…”

Rose smiled, letting Vriska feel her lips move. Vriska’s underwear was thin, black lace, which served less to cover her than to stimulate her. Rose opened and closed her mouth against Vriska, dragging her teeth along her clothed labia.

“Oh, yes, yes,” Vriska gasped, starting to buck. “Bite down,” she demanded, gnawing her own lip, “eat me out.”

Rose bit as hard as she could. Vriska cried out, and shoved her hips into Rose’s face, knocking her head back against the street. Rose took the moment to roll her eyes.

“Oops,” said Vriska, sounding entirely unapologetic. Given a moment alone, however, she peeled off her underwear, pulling her hips up and down and she worked to toss it to the side. “Much better,” she decided. “Now,” she said, but whatever she was about to say was instantly cut off when Rose licked a line up her thigh where a drop of liquid was seeping slowly out of her. Vriska cried out, and arched her body back, so Rose gripped her hips tightly, digging her fingers almost into the crevices in her bones, and began to eat her out.

She pulled on her labia with her teeth, and ran her longue along the very edge of her pussy. Whatever made Vriska buck a little harder, she forced on her harder. She took as long as she possibly could to work her way to Vriska’s clit, teasing the outsides with her teeth and tongue, rubbing Vriska’s hips back and forth with her fingers, sometimes moving to nip at the inside of her thighs instead. When she finally first brushed the tip of her tongue against Vriska’s clit, dragging as slowly as she could manage, Vriska shoved her head against the ground with her hips and kept it there.

It was then, as Rose’s passion began to build, and her thighs clenched and rubbed each other, that she thought about slipping her fingers inside of Vriska’s pussy and tearing her in half with her claws so that her blood flowed warm over her mouth and her eyes, but she only thought about it. It was then when she considered opening up Vriska’s skin with her teeth, teasing her muscles directly, finding her nerves and making her scream, but she only thought about it. And then she considered not using teeth and claws at all (as her fluid seeped into her underwear) and just using other ways to find the bit of Vriska’s brain that made pleasure and panic and pull at it, bite at it, but she only thought about it. She lingered over the thought, but she only thought about it.

And then she thought about biting Vriska’s clit, just to see what would happen, and she did do that. And she pulled up too hard on Vriska’s ribs with her fingers, like she was trying to pull them apart, and Vriska forced her to the ground and bruised her back, but she didn’t stop her. “Gentler,” Vriska demanded.

“Gentler?” Rose asked incredulously.

“On my cunt, genius. Keep doing what you’re doing up here. In fact,” Vriska grabbed Rose’s hands, and slid them over her skin, “move it up a bit.”

Rose pawed at Vriska’s breasts, moving to just barely breathing against Vriska’s clit to tease her. Vriska twisted and pressed her thighs, and Rose flickered her tongue around Vriska’s edges, while she began to mutter lewd things in response to what Rose was doing, between gasps. Vriska always talked dirty during sex, but Rose figured it was less a kink and more a slightly less inhibited version of what she did all the time.

“You gonna eat me out?” asked Vriska. “You gonna bite me?” So, smiling. Rose brushed her teeth against Vriska’s pussy, and pushed up her spine with her hands, and felt for her ribs and her shoulder bones along her back.

Vriska’s skin was very nice, and very smooth, and very warm between her legs, but Rose liked feeling what lay beneath it the most. She imagined the moon whiteness of her bones, and maybe the ripple of her taught, spasming muscles exposed. Rose threaded her fingers through her hair, imagining it like the thread sinews and the cloth of flesh, being gently unwoven from inside her, like a spool of yarn.

Vriska gasped, and began rocking forth and back over Rose of her own accord. Her cheeks were bright red, even in the chill of the night. Rose drug her fingers from Vriska’s neck across her shoulder blades and down her arms, one flesh and one plastic, gently, imagining her fingers as razorblades, taking layers of Vriska’s skin off in her mind like the pages of a book, unbinding her. Rose’s eyes fluttered closed when Vriska had to cover her mouth to mask a scream, but she saw a little glimpse of Vriska’s teeth first, the pointed edges, and she rubbed her own thighs together, and stirred her body against the cold ground.

Vriska said Rose’s name twice, and one of her hands moved to grasp Rose’s hair, just by where her legs were resting. She had her orgasm on Rose’s tongue, rocking back and forth for a while, meeting Rose’s bare teeth on every turn from front to back. Rose had one hand on Vriska’s hip, and one over her womb, where she could have sworn that, through her palm, she could feel Vriska’s blood. She was touching the skin of her fingers to warm skin, but she could also feel layers beneath, of muscle, of mucus, of tissue walls, of warm fluid, blood and bile and the fluids of sex and things deeper and stranger, buried in dark deeps like in the sea, and the legions of bacteria that gave Vriska life, and somewhere, viruses, diseases, waiting to be brewed, where Vriska’s warm body was fighting them.

She felt a potential in Vriska, a pain which could be multiplied, muscles which could cramp, infections which could be urged, things that could be cut, or could be torn, and she felt her own body heat up, more than it had when she was tasting Vriska’s coitus just moments before, heightened by the energy of Vriska’s lust rolling off her body, in sweat and in scent and pheromones, which Rose could almost taste, and with her fingernails curling in desire, she looked up at Vriska, slowly, with heavy eyes.

Vriska was liking her lips, breathing heavily, having just stopped her slow process of rocking against Rose’s mouth, letting her lips excite the last pulses of her orgasm. She was shaking with the strain of not collapsing on top of Rose, which made Rose grin. She pulled her sweaty, tangled hair behind her shoulders, with clumsy fingers, and smiled languidly down at Rose, before seeing her face.

“Oh,” Vriska said, a little surprised, and then slowly, with popping joints, stiff form being held in place, she slowly lowered herself to lie on top of Rose. Though Rose liked to appear unflustered, as Vriska adjusted her breasts against Rose’s breasts, her stomach against hers, her legs around and beside hers, twisted, and her hips over hers, Rose shuddered, and murmured to herself. She felt little scratches in Vriska’s skin, little welts rising, where she had scratched her, and her burned skin still felt hot. Vriska rubbed against Rose a few times, deliberately pushing herself against Rose’s crotch, putting as much friction into her slow grinds as possible, before stopping, and propping herself up on her elbows.

Rose glared at her. Vriska decided to play with Rose’s hair. Rose, being patient, waited for her to say something. Vriska bit her lips a few times first. “I can never believe how soft your hair is.” Her hand trailed towards the shell of Rose’s ear. “Or your skin.”

Rose rubbed her legs along Vriska’s. Vriska smiled, but it was short lived. “You have a look in your eyes,” she said.

Rose didn’t say anything.

“Which are also lovely, by the way, but that’s not the point. You’re thinking about something that isn’t happening here. Normally, I would just assume there’s some kink you’re not telling me about, that you wish I was doing. Of course, knowing you, it’s probably some shit like bathing in my blood, so it’s not worth asking.”

“But then again…” said Rose teasingly.

“Anyway,” Vriska interrupted, actually putting a finger on Rose’s lips, “I don’t think that’s what you’re doing with me.”

“No?”

Vriska leaned down to face Rose, slowly, lowering herself form her elbows. Rose never knew what she did to make her movements so jarring and strange, like watching a spider walking, on bent limbs, instead of a human. “You walked in here looking like a wild animal hunting,” said Vriska. “You should have seen your own eyes then. No more pupil. As round as circles. I’ve never seen you like that. I made a game out of it, whatever. I have to wonder, though. What exactly did I just barely avoid?”

“Nothing,” said Rose sweetly.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Rose repeating, running one arm along the side of Vriska’s stomach. “You didn’t avoid anything.”

“Sure. Because I didn’t notice that I was in the process of fucking the bloodlust out of you.”

Rose pondered, gazing at Vriska’s bust, where it pressed against hers. She rubbed the very side of Vriska’s rib cage. “Well, haven’t you done a bang-up job, then. I haven’t been fucked.”

“You’re trying to distract me,” Vriska noticed, and then she was pressing her lips against Rose’s. Vriska was in a lazy afterglow, but Rose was ravenous, and pulled and tugged and Vriska’s lips and tongue as Vriska sighed and bent and happily obliged.  She opened her mouth and Rose pushed her tongue against her smooth skin, and bit at her lower lip, and sometimes bent so that Rose could find her cheek or the corner of her face instead, where her skin grew weak by her neck. Rose’s hips knocked up against Vriska’s, so Vriska sighed, and pulled up her body, and rubbed back at Rose.

Figuring she wouldn’t really be able to do this right after an orgasm, however, she pulled one of her hands away (the one that was still actually a hand, obviously) from Rose’s boobs, where she had been just barely fondling her, and drug her fingertips down over Rose’s stomach, and around her hipbones, teasingly, to draw a small and a heavy breath out of Rose. She slid her fingers into the band of Rose’s underwear, feeling her damp hair, and smiled when Rose lost her composure and arched her back.

With one hand, Vriska palmed Rose’s chest, though awkwardly, more fondling than caressing, since it was only so capable, feeling along the sides, and underneath, only brushing the very center, and with the other, she inched her way towards Rose’s pussy, only giving Rose and extra inch whenever she felt her squirm. Which, admittedly, didn’t take very long, since Rose was obviously wet and hot already.

Eventually, as Vriska decided to run little kisses down Rose’s throat and collarbone, where she knew she was weak, Vriska rubbed her fingers over Rose’s clit, digging into her, which made Rose do the delicious, deep, rumbling sort of ragged breath she did when she was very turned on. It was a cross between panting and growling, something animalistic, something that only came out of her when she was unguarded and beyond self-control.

Vriska less kissed Rose’s neck and more breathed against it, her hand faltering on Rose’s chest, rubbing up her neck, down her side, catching her nipple in-between her fingers, and she began to push and curl her fingers against Rose. Rose’s breath came from her low and heavy, sometimes coming out in growls, sometimes in hisses, and she rubbed against Vriska in a steady rhythm until Vriska followed it, stroking Rose’s clit when she wanted, and just teasing her along the edges between strokes.

It didn’t take Rose long at all to grow frenzied and hot, but Vriska didn’t mind, because the way Rose was scratching at her, the way Rose was growling, the way Rose was heavy-lidded and enraptured was too enchanting to stop to tease her. Why wouldn’t a woman enjoy watching her partner become overwhelmed with passion, anyway? So Vriska didn’t hold off or try to stretch the moment out, she pushed hard against Rose with her hand, spacing her knees far on either side of her so that Rose had plenty of room to squirm, and petted her neck and her breasts with her free hand.

When Rose clamped both her hands down on Vriska’s hips, Vriska smiled. She leaned down, slowly, to kiss Rose’s cheek, and, once she had her attention, she rubbed Rose’s clit suddenly and viciously, without stopping, and without warning, aiming to make Rose surprise herself with her orgasm.

When Rose gasped and pulled on Vriska’s shoulders, she knew it worked. Rose cried out, with a word incomprehensible, and knocked her hips suddenly, not as a conscious action, but as a muscular reaction, and without trying to censor herself, without stopping to tease or to be glib, she pushed herself desperately against Vriska’s hand, more passionate and more frenzied with every pulse. She bit into her own lip. She suddenly crested, and shuddered all over, almost hissing from the surprise, her eyes closed; and then they fluttered open again, and her hips jerked some several more times to ease the intense feeling built up between her legs, first sharply, then slowly, in waves.

She let out all the air between her lungs, suddenly, when she was spent, and slowly settled on the ground, taking several deep, labored breaths before she was even able to wipe the sweat from her forehead.

It was then, after her orgasm, that Rose’s head began to clear, and the obsessively dark thoughts began to leak away from her mind. In her moments of passion, unbidden, images had come to her mind… blood, the breaking of bones, the image of pits, pits in the earth, filled with people whose throats had all been slit, as sacrifices, and the images of entrails spilt for a soothsayer, and the images of mortal women, shivering and pale, given, not knowing to what they were given, and sensations came to her hands, warm sensations, the sensation of being buried in warm flesh, into organs and around veins, with bones curing around her as she pulled into someone’s chest, forced them open with the strength of her arms, or her things like arms… and for a second, she was sure she was pulling Vriska apart, but there Vriska was, grinning at her, with the dark sky of night on earth behind her head, and buildings rising up around her.

Rose came back to herself, and slowly felt human again. She remembered what things she had been concerned about today. Why she was out here. Why she was screwing Vriska in the first place, since it certainly had nothing to do with sacrifices.

She remembered the dogs.

She felt bad. This feeling of remorse, the pull on her guts, was followed by such incredible relief that she just lay back on the pavement for a while, so overwhelmed by liberation that she felt dizzy. She felt human.

Vriska, for all her faults, touched Rose’s face with concern. “Hey, is everything alright?”

“I’m… just relieved,” said Rose. “It only now caught up to me. I’ve been in… a lot of danger.” Her glance turned to the book, which she had set down beside them when she first crawled towards Vriska. “I’m glad to have that, finally.”

“Glad to get it for you,” said Vriska smugly, lying down again so that she could play with Rose’s hair. But Rose noticed, as she moved her false arm, that Vriska grimaced, and had to pull it up slowly.

“You know, I really think your doctor said something about ideal temperatures and not exposing your arm to anything beyond them,” murmured Rose with a smirk creeping on her lips.

“Fuck off, Rose,” said Vriska.

-

Rose was back home by a little after three in the morning. She had seen worse hours. Pleasantly surprised that there was nothing infesting her house except the normal cloud of fruit flies all over the kitchen, she was settling into bed after a quick midnight snack when her phone buzzed, bearing a text from Vriska.

The text stated this: “fuck you, fuck whatever you did, fuck however you did it.”

Rose thought for a second. “I know I couldn’t have possibly damaged her… oh.” Then she remembered.

“Sorry about the stomach virus,” she texted back. “To be fair, you already had the virus in you, and there was a chance it would have infected you anyway. I have no excuse, dear, strange things are done in the heat of passion. Consider it one of those weird kinks you think I have that I won’t tell you about.”

Vriska responded about five minutes later. “your kink is making people barf out random organs an hour after sex. we’re through. fuck. im finding a preacher and telling him theres a witch to burn. expect him tomorrow, sinner.”

Rose was about to reply telling her that now she had two reasons to see a doctor, so surely, she should go, but Vriska beat her by sending a second text that said, “i’m serious. through. never again, rose lalonde. im going to fuck a shark instead.”

Since Vriska had made similar threats, Rose wasn’t too worried. It was honestly more her worry at how willing she herself had become to manipulate people in this way, even people she cared about, that compelled her to respond.

“I am sorry. Please drink a lot of water between now and when you go to the doctor tomorrow, for my sake.”

Vriska didn’t respond. Rose found herself falling fast asleep.


	5. Chapter 5

Her dream was very nice and very dark. She dreamed about being in a city forgotten by time. She stood in a hallway that had been buried under soil and rock for longer, much longer, than it had ever been used by living beings. The human cities were all buried high above it.

She found herself smiling at nothing, and not knowing why.

It was so dark that she couldn’t see her hands, her limbs, her claws in front of her face. She couldn’t see much at all. The walls were before her, and behind her, and she could feel how they had been expertly carved, she could trace their lines, their crevices, their little lithe forms dancing the steps of prehistoric tales. She was reminded of a children’s book, full of little leaping animals.

Once, there had been altars here. Around human altars, they fired high burning braziers, heavy with plumes of noxious smoke. Her people kept deep pits of water instead.

It was hard to tell where the city finally crumbled and gave way to the boiling inner earth—somewhere after a hundred thin caverns; caverns which had never seen light, maybe after she crawled down a dozen deep shafts, like those of mines, where in some places strange fluttering noises were heard where thin flesh beat against the walls. Maybe it was after the subterranean labyrinth, wreathed with stone, full of statues in forms never seen by human eyes, backs bulging with curlicue spines and shoulder blades torn up by the spines of leathery wings, structures of the skeleton wiped from the evolutionary tree, and maybe it was down the spiral set of monolithic stairs.

She found it. Lava pulsed. It was the first light since the sun had been extinguished. She wasn’t one for light. Her skin was used to the thin averted gaze of starlight, and the sun was an accusing glare. But the hot, viscous stone-light was dim enough, red enough, strange enough to enchant her. It was the blood of the living planet, untainted, sluggish in its veins, sparkling with molten mica, brilliant with liquid metal.

There were still ancient sleepers down here, beneath the soil, beneath even the oceans. Here, where the earth was gravid, where the earth was pressed down, where the earth was scalding.

The closer she got to the center of the earth, the smaller the earth was around. But there were no secret ways in farther, no hidden shafts forgotten to the mind of men, no paths made by older species, compliant, the ancient servants. She would have to work from here on out.

The thought of those loyal ones brought her to reminiscing. The apes, the large lizards, those that they had constructed themselves, the primeval empires on the earth, all with smaller minds, easier to bend. Humans… no, they were not harder to push into submission, but they had a habit of suppression, of submitting to their own brains; they had pathways to ignore the truth. With every new thing they learned as a species, they found a way to suppress it, since nothing did not horrify them. The nature of food, the nature of the body, and its blood and its pulp, the nature of sex, the nature of gods and the nature of the universe—nothing could weight on their minds which could not collapse them. So there was nothing that they would not deny and ignore and suppress.

Oh, she missed the servants. She missed the ones who would feel their fingertips and come.

Well, but she had one, didn’t she? Black fur, bright teeth, and one limb already torn off, leaving a wounded body behind. Not much to defend herself with.

Rose was left with a lingering image of how the obedient ones were once kept in the darkness, often for generations, as the old ones slept, waiting for command. She was left, also, with a lingering sense of possibility, and beneath that, in slippery undercurrent, a dark feeling of possessiveness.

-  
When she awoke, Rose decided that maybe it wasn’t a very nice dream. In fact, it made her feel a little sick as she was pulled, inch by inch, into bodily consciousness, from her dry tongue to her cold toes, and had the mind to think about it. Contrary to the assumptions she had heard made about her, Rose had always been a fan of light.

She had once been a fan of sunrises too, but she hadn’t seen one in some time, and it looked like today wouldn’t be the day for that either.  
No matter what she did, over breakfast, she couldn’t get rid of the image of Vriska crouched in the dark. She would try to think of something else, and her face would appear again, translucent, as if reflected on glass, or vaguely perceived in the shadows. Rose had already dismissed it as a particularly forceful intrusive thought, and, though she knew better, she began to get angry when the thought wouldn’t go away.

  
She poured her tea down the sink and decided it was time to crack open Doctor Scratch’s Grimoire. It was his work that started her troubles, so she only hoped his work had something to solve it.

  
Rose put one hand on the Grimoire, sitting on the carpet, where a beam of sunlight came through the window and lit up the dust in the air, and paused a second to remember. She never cared about Scratch as a person, since he wasn’t a very good one and wasn’t anything but a gate in her path. It was to what spirits were in the book, and what eyes might be watching out of it, that she paid some respect to its deceased author.

  
She remembered the first lecture class she took from him, and his impressive, how he had a polished teaching style, a vocabulary unnecessarily refined for even the classroom, and an undercurrent omnipresent of something being ignored in his speech, in his gestures, in her interactions, a something ignored, a something skimmed over like a bird flying over the trenches of the ocean, a something unmentionable. He taught prehistory, and taught her more about prehistory than any reference material could had tried to. Few other students realized—they didn’t have the breadth of knowledge to realize—that his knowledge had both a span and a minutiae that was not to be expected in his area of study. But she could tell. She knew he mapped the family lines of primordial nature too well, she knew he spoke the words of almost-lost tongues too confidently, with too much a grin. She remembered when he revealed that he not only knew what powers she had gotten herself involved in, but that the wand she had stolen had been stolen from him, and he wanted payment in return. She painted devoted icons of those whom she had summoned for him, creatures like the imaginary chimera, creatures like voids in the air, creatures like shimmering hallucinations that assaulted senses that humans took for granted, putting herself into the circle and letting him stay out. She brought up images of attempting to outdo him and release herself from his power; she mournfully recalled her failure. She remembered her eyes being overtaken, and sketched, in details, from the spines of his books to the pattern of his carpet, the last thing she saw clearly—his parlor room from the vantage of the floor. She lingered finally on the image of his killer and consumer, to make it clear that it was not her, never her, who dealt the final blow. Despite their rivalry, despite her hate, she was remained his apprentice.

  
“And therefore, his heir,” she whispered, before turning over the cover of her new Grimoire.

  
The pages had some odd silvery sheen to them, reminding Rose of mercury. Maybe it was the ink that shimmered after all these years, maybe it was the straight, greyish lines onto which Scratch had penned his knowledge. The pages were unevenly filled with drawings and diagrams as well as thin, vertical lines of text, scrawled not in fine cursive, as she might have expected, but as quick, messy hand script. There were maps to realms unknown; maps in unrealistic, perfect circles, like medieval maps to the heavens, but their countries were labelled with words unknown hieroglyphs. There were anatomical sketches of strange creatures, there were rites and instructions, there were recipes with modern chemical notation but improbable products, there were lists of names and lists of deeds; everything especially important half-covered with his characteristic all-seeing eye scrawled over the text.

  
He spent a lot of effort concealing his knowledge from the world, but she knew all the ways to see past it. When he depended on little spirits to do his work for him, he forgot that he was a terrible person who couldn’t demand any sort of loyalty from the mad magician equivalent of minimum wage summer workers. Rose only had to do so much as smile and brush her hands gently on the pages for all the eyes to shut, black ink drawing thin, and vanishing.

  
After a moment of thought, she flipped to the back of the book, where there were still blank pages, hoping vainly for an index. There was none (and she figured it would be weird to line the names of ancient plagues and pestilences alphabetically next to relevant page numbers anyway) so she began skimming the pages for the name that she wanted to see.

  
The ‘names’ given to the horrors, of course, were not what the horrors would call themselves, but a purposefully and thoroughly obscured cataloguing system made so that sorcerers and summoners could refer to them without drawing their attention. Initially, the system hinged on then relative distance of known horrors from the planet earth, mapping out the old gods by their resting places in the universe, wherever their graves lied in deep space, resistant to gravity, silent planets without stars to turn around, but it ended up that some few horrors were still awake, like comets shooting past the solar systems, so the numbering system really only made sense to anyone who had studied it extensively. Just like any scholarly notation system worth its salt. Those ‘comet’s, horrors that acted awake and alive, were designated with a simple ‘A’ in front of their number, which were assigned to them somewhat arbitrarily, since their number could not signify its location as it did for dormant horrors. There was first a number signifying its preferred dimension of existence, lowest first, with the assumption it could haunt any it wanted, making it ‘A3’. Few horrors would spend their afternoons in the lowly third dimension, so references to this one were particular easy to spot. After the ‘3’ was a short string of numbers vaguely pointing at its assumed limits of power, whose inner workings were too far-fetched to be described quickly, as they put Fahrenheit ’s ideas of where markers should go on a numerical scale to shame, but the numbers themselves were “5702.”

  
Though 5702 would have no inherent meaning to the casual observer, to Rose, it meant ‘not so strong, on the grand scale of things.’ But here ‘not so strong’ is true in the same sense in which it is true that Sol, the Earth’s sun, is a very small star, when compared to other stars. A3-5702 was a small yellow star in the world of horrors, but no one will pretend that the weight of Sol, if balanced on the head of a single human, would be any less crushing than the weight of Canis Majoris.

  
It did mean that there were plenty of bigger horrors in the world that could push A3-5702 around if they could be coerced into doing so, but almost all of them were sleeping, and, again, the task herein outlined would take the effort of roping Canis Majoris into nearby space in order that it may outshine the sun. Though Sol would be summarily and quickly ashamed, it’s obvious this wouldn’t be a solution to anyone oppressed by the heat of the day. They would instantly immolated for the attempt to fight fire with fire.

  
Now, Rose would be lying if she hadn’t considered that a solution. Maybe death would just make her soul ripe for the picking, but if she found a way to obliterate herself totally, there would be no way to abuse the remains.

  
This was still her secondary plan.

  
Sadly, it was the secondary plan to a plan that didn’t exist yet. Without actually checking what the book said yet, a bit nervous to do so, she just tagged the pages where she saw A3-5702 written for further exploration. The number of occurrences made her heart blossom, made her guts writhe. But then she came across a page where her horror’s name was written in times as numerous as the object of a love letter.

  
Her name was right beside it. Rose put a single hand on her chest. She wasn’t aware that Scratch knew about what had happened. He shouldn’t have known. She had made the pact hours before his death. The pact had killed him, in the end. And that end had been swift.

  
So what was this? Even just skimming the page, Rose knew the only thing it could be was a prediction of the bond that was eventually to come between her and it. She hadn’t thought Scratch was clairvoyant, and besides, a clairvoyant would look into her future and probably have a seizure scream about the all-consuming darkness and the bones and the blood come gushing from the pale mouth and some such, not get out a pad of paper and write down “A3-5702” right beside their price for the session. What she was looking at was some sort of scheme in which her future possession was intended, planned out by her former master, despite him being smart enough to know the danger that came with that.

  
Reading more closely, she saw that Scratch, through methods yet unknown to her, had become aware that A3-5702, in its movements through space, had been drawn close to earth, partly because others of its kind have been sleeping in the rare sentience-bearing planet for some eons now. Perhaps it was curiosity that drew it, perhaps it was the scent of blood, tantalizing even when blown by solar winds, leaking into the deep dark sea of space. Whatever called it, Scratch had heard the call, and had taken it upon himself to arrange a match between the horror and his apprentice.

  
What on earth could his angle have been? Rose couldn’t believe he had really become a cultist in his later years, intent on rising the gods, since he of all people would know what that meant. He was staunchly anti-apocalypse. Had he been hoping to actually gain control over a whole Horrorterror by putting her in the front of it?

  
“Not unless he was under the impression that human flesh makes a great barrier against lava flow too,” she muttered. Scratch’s Grimoire proved infuriatingly fact-based, giving Rose calculations about A3-5702’s position in the universe (always bound by three dimensions, but that was conceivable enough, considering its particular fondness for the workings of the physical body) and notes about what could be done to call and coerce it. It didn’t leave notes about plans to influence Rose, or even what the hell he thought he was going to do when a real, weapons-grade horror appeared in the solar system. All that became clear was that he wanted to call the horror in, make sure it set its eyes on earth, and that he wanted to put Rose in the line of its gaze.

  
“But why, you stupid man?” Rose asked. “Why would that result in anything but the both of us dead and earth ripe to be plucked?”  
There was a disturbing amount of filled pages after this section, proving it had been written some time before his actual death, but few mentions of that particular plot among it. All she knew now was that her fate had been planned, and not what the intention of that plan was, or if it had been accomplished.

  
“I don’t know what he thought he could accomplish beyond death,” she muttered, standing up to pace the room, “if his aim WAS to die. And if he wanted to get into the powers of the spirit, he could have died in any other way. He could have died in a formal ritual, and empowered his soul after death. It’s looking more and more cultist, but he wasn’t cultist.”

  
She paused by a windowsill. “And though I like to hate the man, I know his schemes rarely went wrong. It would be too tempting to say his elaborate scheme collapsed and killed him, but… but what would be be aiming for is this was what he wanted? He didn’t want revenge on me for anything.” Though their relationship was complicated, that statement, she was sure, was still true. “Could he possibly gain anything by this death? And, if this wasn’t his goal, what was his goal?”

  
Rose tapped her fingers on the walls as she passed them by. “I think I find myself twice puppeted,” she admitted. “I doubt Scratch just handed over the strings. I wonder if my horror knows that it’s playing a game with a dead human?” For she couldn’t believe now that Scratch’s death was accidental. Perhaps she couldn’t see how it could be anything but, but she had never seen one of her old master’s plots go awry before. It was impossible to believe that he had just… failed, finally.

  
“Did he really write nothing else about it?” she asked angrily, and collapsed on the floor to rifle through the book again. Facts, definitions, figures about power and shape and size, things that were good to know, things that could all be useful, things that could point her in the direction of figuring out its nature and, more importantly, its biology, but nothing about what she really wanted to know. Bitterly, she knew she wasn’t looking for her horror, she was looking for her old master, who left her with so very little.

  
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again,” she muttered bitterly, “it was his own fault.”

  
She rolled over a bit to her side, peering out of lidded eyes to a blurry and watery version of her every day world. Clean living room, dust in the sunlight, slightly dried-up ferns in pots by the wall, black-bound books on the floor. “It could be useful,” she admitted. “If there is a plot, there could be a way to unravel it. Maybe.”

  
She clutched herself closely on her side. Her stomach hurt a little. She was nervous, she was worried. The house was shut up, and the air was getting humid. The sun had gotten high enough so that she could see its rim, scarlet and simmering, over her window frame, and it found flaws and scores in the glass, which it traced with red and yellow. Black branches stirred, covering the light, and then revealing it, causing her eyes to dilate, making the world go white.

  
The clean carpet felt so solid against her cheek. It prickled at her pores and was consistently uncomfortable. One of Rose’s hands slowly flattened itself against the solid floor of her own house, unmoving as a cornerstone.

  
“I’ll just go talk to Eridan,” she said eventually. “I’ll just go talk to Eridan, get his opinion on this, won’t that be good? He deserves to know, anyway. He’s come up with clever ideas about these things before. It wouldn’t be a loss. It will be… I’ll go talk to Eridan.”

  
Still, it was maybe an hour until she was blinking at the sunlight just outside the doorframe, wrapped in a shawl, feeling disoriented. She recognized a vague and numb shock swimming around her stomach like a silky, diaphanous jellyfish. Even though she should have been thinking feverishly, her thoughts were dull and slow, distracted easily by turning leaves and by gusts of the fragrant wind, smelling like autumn rot. The alternating heat and coolness of the breeze hissed over the curves of her face, and scattered behind her. She clutched her hair in a momentary panic that it would blow away.

  
Her steps were uneven and wobbly as she made her winding way down curving, river-like suburban streets, down hills and beside ravines, with the sounds of migrating fowl calling somewhere far away from her, to the bookstore. She walked where sidewalks were not paved, by back roads, on top of the dry and grimy crabgrass which had met the wheels of SUVs before. No one was outside that afternoon, but for a few slow-driving, cautionary cars.

  
They all made her nervous when they went past her, though.

  
The bookstore, as always, managed to look friendly no matter what was happening; painted in bright colors, promising sales, bedecked with flowers and smiling faces. But when she opened the door, to her surprise, Eridan was not inside. He had his own life occasionally, of course, and he wasn’t the only man the store employed, but she was sure it was one of his regular hours. Instead, Jade Harley was behind the desk, looking cheerful and capable, shouting over her shoulder at some unknown person in the back of the store.

  
Rose pulled in her breath to think of something to say, but Jade got to it first. “Oh, Rose, did you stop by to see Eridan?”

  
“Well, yes,” admitted Rose, “he’s easier to find here than at his house.”

  
“I get the idea that he’s not home often.”

 

“He’s not the sort to actually answer the door,” Rose corrected. “Here, he can’t stop me.”

  
Jade giggled a little. “Oh wow, that sounds just like him. There was one time we were having an office party, right? Just a celebration for the store’s anniversary. And there was actually a search party sent to his house to fetch him to the pizza parlor because he was that bad at answering the messages on his phone.”

  
Rose put a hand on her mouth. “Oh, no,” she sighed, “that’s something we two have in common.”

  
“What, is that how you met?” Then Jade considered what she had just said. “Then again, how can two people meet through being really determined to never talk to anyone ever? That sort of doesn’t make sense.”

  
“By sitting in the same hidden corner in the classroom.”

  
“Oh, you went to college together? Wait, Eridan went to college?”

  
“He was a drop-out, unfortunately,” said Rose. “I had always hoped he spent a little more time in serious intellectual cultivation. He has a mind that could be honed.”

  
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Jade said. “He always says such clever things, you know? Things that you have to stop and think about for a second. But it’s just wasted in the tar pit of angst of angst he likes to wallow in! Slow down, Nietzsche, no one’s in the mood for hearing about why everything is a lie and we all are just dust in the wind today. Even if maybe the theory is a little cool.”

  
Rose laughed. It was the ‘slow down, Nietzsche’ that had gotten her. It was the sort of moment where a friend is made. Jade talked with her hands—hands that were covered in colorful string in little weaves and knots, topped with equally colorful nail polish, and she looked into Rose’s eyes more often than Rose was used to. It was different. “Oh, no, that’s just what he’s like,” she agreed, covering her mouth, “so much potential, but in such a state. Well, he has his problems, I know that. And it seems that skipping work is one of them?”

  
Jade shrugged. “He called in yesterday, said he had some sort of important meeting. I was looking for more hours, so that’s fine by me. I’m trying to fund a project that doesn’t really have any existent laboratories working on it.”

  
Rose raised her eyebrows. “You’re a scientist?”

  
Jade turned a bit red, and shrugged awkwardly. “I dabble in robotics, that’s what I was trained in. But I’m not an employed scientist, if that’s what you mean.”

  
“Oh, employed, nonsense,” said Rose. “It sounds like you’re enquiring into useful things, that’s good enough for me. But really, did Eridan say where he was headed today?”

  
Jade considered. “Did he?...” She craned her head around to look into the store. “Jake, did Eridan say anything about where he was gonna be today?”

  
“Did he?” asked a heavy accent from somewhere among the shelves. “All he said on the phone was that he had an important meeting. He said it had something to do with the monetary area of his life, and I figure, that’s a man’s private business, isn’t it? No good to go poking around where one shouldn’t poke, I say.”

  
Jade turned around to face Rose, annoyed look on her face. “Forgive him, he’s feral. We’re trying to re-integrate him into normal society. He has yet to understand that ‘Charles Dickens’ is not an acceptable dialect.” She turned back around. “Thanks Jake!!”

  
“My pleasure!”

  
Jade shrugged. “Sorry, guess like we don’t know much about it. We’re pretty used to taking him at his word because he hardly ever calls in, he’s always here on time, and chances are when he says something, he’ll do it. He’s helped me out enough times for me to not really doubt him on these things.”

  
“Has he really?”

  
“Yeah, he does me favors all the time. He’ll fetch you things, bring you food, cover for you… I think he’s a bit of a workaholic is the problem. Did you know he’s been painting the store?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“Yeah, he’s thrown himself into this place,” Jade said, looking around fondly. “That’s part of why we trust him so much!! He’s so earnest and serious about the store.”

  
“He does have a passion in him,” Rose admitted. “I don’t always think of him that way. I guess… maybe it’s because I remember him as a lazy college student.”

  
Jade shrugged. “He has his bad side. Whatever. Hey, do you have time to sit down and chat?”

  
Rose looked startled. “What? Yes, I suppose I do, of course, but…”

  
“Don’t wanna hang out? That’s fine,” Jade shrugged. “I just noticed we were really failing the Bechdel test right there, I figured I’ve seen you around enough that I might talk about what’s up with you, instead of just what’s up with Eridan.”

  
Rose paused, a hand on her shawl, a hand on the door. She didn’t want to talk to a stranger, god knows she didn’t. Yet… “Oh, I don’t know, I hear I’m a very poor conversationalist. I’m never aware of the topical subjects of the day.”

  
Jade shrugged. “You can leave if you like, I guess.”

  
But Rose had a problem. To this day, despite how long she had lived along, despite the psychology she had studied to erase the problem, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t leave the room if anyone was less than happy with her. It was hard. She had tried to kick the habit. She had told herself she wasn’t a child anymore, and it shouldn’t matter. She had realized that not everyone could be pleased. She had realized that sometimes, people had to be disappointed. She had told herself that childhood coping skills weren’t translatable to the adult world.

  
She had thought she wouldn’t feel guilt over such things any more, after the sorts of things she had done. But there it was, a special sort of stomach acid, enjoying the tender flesh of her larger intestine.

  
Awkwardly, and keeping herself tight to her body, she walked to the counter, and laid her bag beside Jade, who smiled. She placed herself onto a chair, nervously, already sure she would fail the conversation.

  
Wasn’t she done with these sorts of worries yet?

  
‘So,” she said stiffly, “you were… trained in robotics?”

  
Jade nodded. “My grandpa raised me, he was fascinated with the ways of the modern world, to the point where he decided to master all of them and eventually started building computers despite being, like, incredibly old. He had the joy of life, you know? That’s where it started; I grew up around abandoned machinery parts. I remember playing with little LED lights and busted motherboards as a toddler and being frustrated when I couldn’t make them do anything like Pa could. He made a Dream Jade at one point! Well he called her that. She was just basically a metal version of me that would blink and move her fingers and stuff. A first foray into robotics for him. Didn’t actually have an AI in her, so she wasn’t scary, but it’s weirder the more I look back.”

  
“I can see how it would be unsettling.”

  
“I guess I was just his pet granddaughter, you know? So he devoted a lot of time to me. He was on social security and all, didn’t have a job, so we spent all of our time together. He loved his work so much that I fell in love with it too, you know? The robots were magical when I was young, so they became a sort of inspiration.”

  
“I think I know what you mean.”

  
Jade smiled. “Really?”

  
Rose balked. “Well… I suppose I grew up with fairy tales. A lot of children did. But they were precious to me. My mother… well, she got them for me, you know. She didn’t… well, they were rare gifts. So I treasured the fairy tale books. I learned to read alone. By myself. usually before I fell asleep at night, under my quilt. She… I treasured them as an inspiration. They gave me feelings I didn’t have in my everyday life. I would read those stories whenever I had spare time from all my lessons and then spend all my time making illustrations for them. Until I started reading high fantasy instead, I suppose.”

  
The tale was poorer when censored.

  
“So those were the things that stuck by you, huh? So you became a fairy when grown up?” Jade teased.

  
“An author,” said Rose, flushing. “Though, I suppose my tastes changed a little.”

  
“Did they?”

  
“I write in the horror genre,” Rose said uncomfortably, “which I always considered a subset of fantasy.”

  
Jade pondered. “I never thought of it that way. I can see it though. Still, it’s way different from fairy tales!”

  
“It is,” Rose said. “I was given more free time as a teenager. I quit some of my lessons. I started reading novels instead, branching into different genres. And, well, I was infected with moods like a lot of teenagers. I became a bit surly and bitter, and bitterness doesn’t react well with fairies.”

  
“We all know what happened to Tinkerbelle,” Jade said solemnly.

  
“I don’t think that I ever stopped loving them, but… they seemed to no longer be accessible from where I was. You could say that I decided to leave them alone, not in a sense of abandonment, but in a sense of… respect. Respect from a person who shouldn’t be touching them.”

  
“That sounds sad,” said Jade. Her eyes were wide, and honestly considerate, and green.

  
Rose grew cold to the conversation. “Perhaps it was, at the time.”

  
Jade didn’t seem too overcome with sympathy though. “I just think it’s important to stay connected to the past, you know? Or else you sort of lose yourself. You forget how you became what you are.”

  
“Maybe so.”

  
Jade took a sip from a mug of coffee. “It’s just my thinking, anyway.” She stretched her arms over her head, pouring the conversation away from her like water off her back. “It’s a dark topic, though! Everyone our age is already sick of talking about our childhoods, ha ha. Do you work anywhere, by the way?”

  
“No.”

  
“Oh, duh, of course you don’t, you’re a novelist!” Jade smacked herself on the forehead. “Jeeeeze, I’m so slow sometimes.”

  
At that point, they were interrupted by Jake’s formless voice from the back. “Jade, I’ve become pretty well acquainted with the bothersome cataloguing system in this store, but all the same, I can’t give you even a blunderbuss’s idea about where these here books should be set!”  
Jade shook her head, slowly, and painfully. “Be right there, Jake,” she sighed.

  
She looked up brightly at Rose, holding her hands up in supplication. “Wait just a minute, okay?”

  
“Okay,” Rose said, though she didn’t want to at all.

  
She waited all the same.

  
-

  
It was about then that Eridan was getting off of the bus into the lovely inter-city neighborhood where his quarry lived, surrounded by carefully trimmed maple trees fences in by concrete circles. They were not far outside the part of the city where skyscrapers crowded each other into straight rows, but here, things were far more spaced out, built long after the center of the city rose, artificially luxurious, close to the businesses but clearly property of the business owners. The whole of the neighborhood was remarkably clean, as well as so geometrically spaced that it could have been a chessboard. On the right days, you could walk from one end to the other without seeing a soul.

  
Eridan, with hair dyed several colors by now by way of accidents, with clothes as nice as he could get from thrift stores and moderate sewing skill, with an old backpack he used to use in high school, fit in just as well as an errant moose might have. He hadn’t dressed for the weather. It was colder than he expected, so he had to clutch himself tightly, which made him look as thin as a skeleton, and as white as one too, where the wind stole the pale tones from his skin.

  
He had grown up in a house a lot like this. He hadn’t seen it in years, though. He knew he would never see it again. But it was weird, he guessed, that he had somehow become uncomfortable around the same sort of neighborhood he used to sleep in at nights.

  
He had to pull out the map he had printed from the internet—despite the roads all being as straight as sticks laid out, he couldn’t quite remember where to turn. It was because they all had such similar names—they were all names after animals with dumb words like “look” and “run” and “valley” following. Map or not, he still got lost, before he finally found his way to a house almost identical to the rest, hidden behind tall pine trees on a yard strewn with their needles.

  
It was almost identical to the rest, but for the general mess and the creative ‘beware’ signs littering the yard, none of which have anything to do with dogs. It was when he saw these that Eridan knew it had to be the right house.

  
Eridan calmed himself on the front porch for about five minutes. If he stood still in the very corner, under the awning, he could hear the bass line of the song playing somewhere inside. He might have recognized it. Or he might have not.

  
It made him think, for a minute.

  
He rang the doorbell once he had the courage to, though the sound made his guts twist up. He could swear he heard the ornery cussing inside, and the music switching off, but not the silent, unshod footsteps that came to the door.

  
It was unlocked with jerks, as if the person inside had actually forgotten how locks work, and then the door was tossed open about two feet, and the person stood, arms crossed, eyebrows up, leaning against the door as if to keep it in place, incredulous. “Hey?” he asked.

  
The funny line Eridan was going to open with sort of died on his lips, but fuck if he wasn’t going to say it anyway. He just didn’t expect Sollux to look so… unchanged. “H-hey,” he started, “remember that fuck-up you knew in college but stopped hanging out with because he was just so incredibly fucked up?”

  
“What,” asked Sollux, looking like he didn’t believe what he was seeing.

  
“He’s back, and he wants help,” Eridan finished, feeling a little more ashamed than he even expected.

  
“Jesus fuck,” Sollux declared. His thick and patchy hair was longer, left to grow uncontrolled, so he had to sweep it away from his face. He still had to wear his yellow-framed, heavy coke-bottle glasses, which made his eyes look glassy and wide all the time. Eridan remembered him contracting some problem with his eyes that made the wearing of contact lenses impossible. He was as drained and wan as he had always been, marked in every joint and junction by a life of insomnia and reclusion.

  
Well, Eridan wasn’t going to pretend he was a prize anymore either. But at least he still brushed his hair.

  
“Someone slap me right off the dock of this fucking nightmare cruise and back into reality,” said Sollux, “Eridan Ampora hasn’t rolled over and died in the years I haven’t seen him . Am I being punked?”

  
“I promise that I’m always the one being punked,” said Eridan, “continually. Constantly. With the single-minded purpose of a god who exists to hate me.”

  
“It’s actually Eridan,” Sollux marveled. Then, throwing up his arms in surrender and turning on his heel, he marched away and shouted at his empty house “Someone call up Ripley and tell him I just don’t fucking believe it!”

  
Sollux walked down the hallway and out of sight, but he left the door open behind him. Eridan barely stepped inside, and closed the door to the cold behind him. “Hey,” he said.

  
“How could this happen to me?” Sollux asked his ceiling. “I did my time. I made my penance. I thought I was done. I thought I was free. I thought I was done with this chapter of my life.”

  
“Yeah, thanks, I’m glad to see you too,” Eridan muttered to himself.

  
He wasn’t sure how he had furnished a rose colored memory of this guy. Hindsight needed glasses just as much as this asshole.

  
Following the cursing, Eridan eventually found Sollux face-first into a couch, looking incredibly forlorn about the ugly awakening he had just endured. Eridan sat awkwardly across from him, in the sort of armchair he actually hadn’t seen outside of psychologists’ offices before that point. “Uh, hi,” he tried again.

  
“Don’t talk to me,” Sollux moaned, “I can’t do it. The shock is too much. I can’t process it all. I feel so much regret.“

  
“Hey, um,”

  
“I can’t do it. Bring the responsibility to someone else. It’s too heavy for me. I cannot bring the ring to Mordor.”

  
“Look…”

  
“I’m sorry, I thought I was gonna massively troll the gay boy in my stupid requirement class, I was bored, I know it was a mistake now, the jerks I called friends were egging me on, and I’m sorry. I’m SORRY, okay? I didn’t know he would come back. I didn’t know what I had started. I didn’t know that he was secretly the king of never letting an argument go, I didn’t realize what I had called up with my foolish, freshman merry making. I’m just SORRY. I didn’t mean it. I take it all back. I can’t be responsible for this. I was ready for anything but saying hello to the actual most embarrassing chapter of my past bright and early today. I can’t do it. I’m sorry for plaguing everyone I knew with this incredible horseshit. I’m sorry for starting anything at all. A million times I’m SORRY, now take him away.”

  
Eridan waited for a minute, mostly to make sure his voice was steady. “Okay, sure, are you done?”

  
Sollux groaned.

"Alright, first off, I'm bisexual, okay? I've told you that before."

  
Sollux groaned louder.

  
“Look, it’s important, these sorts of things, using the right labels—oh, fuck it, you didn’t care before, you’re not gonna care now,” Eridan sighed. “I’m sorry to bother you, okay? I’m as sorry as you are. This is a reunion I didn’t want to have. But I’m in pretty deep shit, and I need to bother SOMEONE for help, and I’m tired of bothering Rose.”

  
Sollux finally looked up. Somewhere beyond the bird’s nest of hair that being dramatic on the couch had given him, he looked shocked and concerned. “You still speak to RL? She’s alive too? Above ground, breathing, and, like, not being prosecuted for anything?”

  
“Yeah, for now,” said Eridan, smiling for a second.

  
“I don’t know anyone else who still talk to Rose,” Sollux admitted. “A lot of us wondered where she went after college, but she doesn’t exactly have a big online presence, you know? Or a big presence anywhere.”

  
“You just have to be in the right circle,” said Eridan, somewhat snottily.

  
“Circle? Are you implying anyone ELSE still talks to RL?”

  
“Actually?” Eridan said, forgetting himself, “I think she and Vris still have a thing.”

  
“Whoa, wait, what?” Sollux asked. He put up his hands, which forced him to sit up a little, albeit slowly. “Wait a second, this means VK has managed to have a lasting relationship for… how long now?”

  
“I don’t believe it either,” Eridan said.

  
“Match made in hell,” said Sollux reverently. “Shit. What are they even doing with their lives? VK, some people still talk to VK, I know she spends her days partying, more or less, but she never mentioned hanging out with RL. No one’s even seen her in years.”

  
“Look, I don’t know what they do around each other, Vris still doesn’t talk to me.” Eridan immediately wished he hadn’t said that, since Sollux snorted. “Oh, god’s sake, don’t bring that up again. She wasn’t a beard. It was barely a relationship anyway. It’s done, it’s over, I’m even willing to admit it was partly my fault, so just don’t.”

  
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Sollux said, but he was grinning. “I still don’t believe it though. All of you crazy assholes, still alive, still kicking, still doing fuck knows what, and none of us ever knew. You all disappeared off the face of the earth in the same train to hell or something after college. It’s amazing, it’s like looking into another little world parallel to the average world of social norms and adult life and sanity. A worse world.”

  
“Well, it’s not like anyone was checking up on us,” Eridan snapped. “You could have figured out where we all were if you just looked.”

  
Sollux paused to steeple his fingers in front of his face, his elbows perched on his knees. “Eridan.”

  
“What.”

  
“ED.”

  
“What?”

  
“No one wanted to find you people.”

  
Eridan with through expressions of affront, disbelief, anger, and resignation in about five seconds. He almost hissed a little, which made Sollux quirk up an eyebrow, and then he faced him with a glower. “Don’t think I’m surprised, okay? It’s not like I didn’t realize everyone hated me. I knew. Guess it was just my stupid fuckin arrogance that made me think someone would want to know I was alive. Or would want to find my newest livejournal in order to leave humorous comments all over my posts for the perusal of the entirety of Something Awful, I don’t fuckin know.”

  
“Alright, in retrospect, that might have gotten out of hand,” Sollux conceded, but he was interrupted.

  
“Maybe it was just my moronic self-absorption that made me think I actually mattered, mattered enough to anyone at all from my past that they would want to know what happened to me, that they would maybe want to see me again, or even make sure I was still alive, but look, I’m wrong, I’m clearly wrong, and clearly all I’ve done is darken your doorstep, even coming all polite and prepared to apologize for past mistakes for the sake of a fuckin favor.” Alright, Eridan could hear the little bit of a whine in his voice. But he was riding an emotional tide and he wasn’t going to turn it around easily now. “I’ll lay down an apology anyway. I was a piece of shit in college, and I antagonized a lot of people for no fuckin reason. I had stupid opinions on stupid things, which I think should be forgiven me on grounds of being a fuckin freshman, but I guess not. I never apologized then, but I’m a better man now, and I can apologize today. I’m sorry for making your life more shitty, alright? I’m sorry for making everyone’s life more shitty. I know you don’t like me. You don’t have to pretend you do. So just let me put down a proposal and I can leave.”

  
“Whoa, holy shit,” said Sollux, stupefied. “Holy shit.”

  
“After I ask this from you—” Eridan started, but Sollux interrupted him again.

  
“Wait, no, I’m still processing this,” said Sollux, holding up a hand. “Holy SHIT, ED.”

  
“What?” Eridan snapped, arms crossed, cheeks burning.

  
“I… I’m sorry, I don’t even know what to say. I just. Thank you for this big ball of crazy that has been offered me. I just want to put it on the shelf and stare at it. As a trophy. I don’t even get speeches like this anymore, now that I just have a boring responsible adult life, you know? Holy shit, ED. Slow down, crazy.”

  
Though Sollux probably wasn’t aware that he had grafted his method for poking reactions out of people into his every day mannerisms, his nonchalance and irreverence were, on that day, the catalyst to Eridan’s unbalanced equation. He was treated to an explosion the likes of which he had no intention to cause.

  
“Screw you, Sol! Screw you!” Eridan shouted, and stood up in the next second, heading for the hallway. “FUCK ME for thinking bygones could just be bygones between us! Fuck me for thinking you would have changed at all, would have been willing to help me, when I come here, apologizing, tail between my legs, acting like a fucking moron just in the hope that you would deign to help me along. Fuck you!”

  
At this point, Eridan had made his way to Sollux’s front door, and he fully intended to exit through it, but he heard that Sollux had gotten up and was following him. And he turned around to see if Sollux was really going to try and stop him before he heard the guy laughing. And then Eridan found himself turning around and yelling at Sollux for all his tenor lungs were worth. “Fuck you for all your stupid trolling! Fuck you for never taking anything seriously, you athhole!” Which was a low blow, and Eridan knew it. But Sollux smiled when he said it, which immediately extinguished the small regret Eridan felt upon saying it. “Fuck me for ever trying to be friends with you! Fuck me for thinking you would help! Fuck me for thinking I deserved it too! Just, fuck me! Fuck me for thinking I even deserved to get out of this hell-hole! Fuck me for turning to you, fuck me for deciding to swallow my pride and ask for help! And fuck me for wanting it!”

  
Maybe it was yelling all of the air out of his lungs that made Eridan half-collapse against the wall, or maybe he tripped while trying to leave for his dramatic entrance. In any case, he stumbled against the wall, and found Sollux helping him up. He pushed Sollux away, lightly, surprisingly lightly, surprising even to himself, and sighed. “Nevermind. Nevermind everything. Fuck you in general, moving on. I just… don’t want to bother Rose anymore. For money. I came here wanting money. That’s all. I just don’t want to bother Rose anymore.”

  
Sollux, being ever a man that saw several options, saw a few ways to follow this up. Almost all of them were inexcusable on account of being dramatically undignified. There was no code of ethics that ordained the treatment of mad men who wander into your house to scream old grudges at you apparently in a quest to prove how awkwardly sore they still are about them, and Sollux was primarily concerned with not mentioning any of them ever again.

  
Eventually, Sollux just decided to shrug the whole thing off. There was no fucking reason to deal with this amount of crazy. “Dude, you could have said you wanted money ten minutes ago. I get how that works. We can work that out. The rest of that was way not needed.”

  
Eridan glared at Sollux; his face was all bright red, and his eyes were narrow. “I wouldn’t have asked you. I didn’t have anyone else. I just don’t want to bother Rose anymore.”

  
“Didn’t you have rich parents back in the day?”

  
“They won’t give me anything.”

  
“You’re sure about that?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“You really had no one else?”

  
Eridan leaned back out the window, looking a little like a sick man draped over the toilet. “What are you trying to do, drag a confession about how alone I am out of me?”

  
“It’s a little less ‘why you’ and a little more ‘why me?’”

  
“Why’d you make all this fuckin money if you didn’t want people asking for pieces of it?”

  
“Y’know, maybe, after growing up in poverty, and not having a lot of food sometimes, the idea just sort of appealed to me,” Sollux said. “Can we make this a no-grudge zone for maybe… five minutes?”

  
“I tried to talk plainly with you from the start,” Eridan muttered.

  
“Nnno,” said Sollux, “No, but fuck talking about that anymore. Fuck that, seriously, let’s make this really easy, give me your bank account info, I send you a transfer of approximately two hundred, three hundred, something along those lines, and we don’t talk about this again.”

  
Eridan glared at him warily. “That’s all?”

  
“I could push it to five hundred but then I might have to ask what the fuck you need it for.”

  
“That’s not what I meant. How about arrangements for paying you back?”

  
“ED, no,” sighed Sollux, “just no. I already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I’m not getting this back. You don’t have a way to get it back to me. We could pretend it was a loan for the sake of appearances but, dude, you don’t have any money to pay me back, and you’re not going to get the money to pay me back. Your payment is total and complete silence on the matter.”

  
“Fuck you,” said Eridan.

  
Sollux raised his eyes to the ceiling in supplication. “If only I knew what for.”

  
Eridan was decidedly silent on the matter. He just continued brooding at Sollux’s front door until he stormed off suddenly, walked back into his living room, rifled around his desk until he found a blue pen and some lined paper, and wrote down anything Sollux could possibly need to give him money onto it. “You can try to fuck me over with this if you want,” he muttered, “There’s nothing to fuck up.” He slammed down the pen and turned to face Sollux again. “I would never fucking accept this if it weren’t for Rose.”

  
“Why are you even fucking mad at me?” The sarcasm, the tone of removed the reproach, the very negativity slipped out of Sollux’s tone for a minute, entirely without his intent. “I know I made a few mistakes with you. A few bad mistakes. And I’m sorry. But why are you so fucking angry?”  
And somehow, they were both completely silent for a second, and looking directly at each other, and Eridan’s hand was still holding out the notepad, but Sollux wasn’t taking it.

  
Eridan seethed, but he didn’t have an answer. He swept past Sollux to leave. Not quite satisfied, Sollux stood up to follow him. “Hey,” he said, as Eridan got his handle on the door.

  
Eridan turned. Somehow, though maybe he hadn’t realized it, anger had mixed on his fact with an expression of being lost. “How’s Karkat?” he asked quietly.

  
Sollux paused. “Why didn’t you ask him that the half dozen times he tried to call you?”

  
The anger finally slipped out of Eridan’s face, with the suddenness of the last grain of sand slipping out of the neck and to the bowels of the hourglass. Eridan failed so totally, so completely at finding an answer to that that wasn’t pathetic in the utmost that he just turned around, slammed the door behind him, and left Sollux’s house.

  
Sollux was left staring at his door with the expression of a man who does not believe what he just saw. “Oh, fucking christ,” he said to himself, shaking his head. The sheer amount of dirty laundry Eridan had just aired in front of his face was beyond his ability to wash alone.  
Well, more beyond his patience than his ability. He was still pretty sure that no one in the world should have to deal with this. He was generous with money, having known what it was like to be desperate. He was pretty sure a lot of Eridan’s anger came from having to ask for that sort of money. But the more he thought about it, the more he wished that, just this once, he had kicked the loser out of the street and declared he would have no more to do with the situation.

  
And the more he thought about it, the more he realized there were a few things that had to be done now. The more he realized what things should be done, the more he regretted having to be the one to do them.

  
Of course, he was thinking more about Karkat by the time he was done reluctantly turning the situation around in his head. Honestly, he was only thinking about Karkat. He wouldn’t even be considering dipping his toes into the mess of disgusting situations that had just been offered to him if it wasn’t for Karkat.

  
But he figured Karkat deserved it, as stupid as the whole ordeal would be. And for a guy like Sollux, who spent most of his time looking for assholes to expose, in all their grimy glory, so they could be duly mocked, that sort of sentiment meant something.

  
-

  
It had happened. She hadn’t meant it. She hadn’t realized it was real.

  
She had been fighting. Her claws, her teeth, her muscles, the power of her ropy torso, the bludgeoning force of her hard skull. She had been trying to get them off of her. They were little strands, like roots, like the pale roots of dandelions that dangle in the cold ground, or like strings of saliva, cold and stinging like icicles, cold and stinging like jellyfish tentacles.

  
They were on her. They were in her. They were going for her face, and she had to rip them out. They scrambled all over her skin, looking for a hold. But because of her tearing, her ripping, her fighting, they were all around her hands, in piles, dead tentacles, dead stringers, dead little fingers and strands of hair, a pile of worms, layers of snakeskin. Or maybe she was the one who had so many fingers. They sucked at her. Lampreys. The stung at her. Wasps. They crawled. Millipedes.

  
The dead ones she could pour off, but there were strands, dripping, like steady, slow rain from the skin above—the white sky? The black sky? The red sky? The sky? and they had bitten into her, and she couldn’t just pick them off.

  
In retrospect, part of the reason she was so frenzied is her talk with Eridan’s coworker… didn’t go well. She was ashamed with herself. She was angry about how she had talked about herself. She told herself to keep quiet in those situations. She told herself this before. Many times before. Why hadn’t she listened? Was she stupid? Nothing good came of these things. There was no reason to talk to these people. She had to stop.

  
But she wasn’t… it was because they were all over her skin. Their little teeth, little stingers, their little goddamn veins, their hairs, their own little fingers, had gotten all over her arm, they had found her blood stream, they were bulging under her skin. She fought, and clawed, to tear them away.

  
She ended up in her own house, in the kitchen, of all places, and there was blood. There was a lot of blood. There was some skin too. All of it was hers. The floor was all wet. There was nothing else.

  
It was because she had been fighting. She could still feel the fucking venom, even. She could feel the venom biting under here eyeballs, sucking at the flesh of her esophagus. She could feel where they had bit her. The poison was still in her system. All her limbs were numb. It was because THEY HAD BEEN THERE.

  
But this hadn’t happened before. She had never been… left like this. She had never. Well.

  
It had been real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope those of you (sweet and kind and beautiful as I am sure you all are) who have chosen to read this story have noticed the author has a few screws loose. If it's worth anything, I blame those screws for forgetting I was writing a really cool story for several months. It's not dead until I am I can tell you that. I think I might be refinding my mood to write on this thing which is good because it's a favorite project of mine. This chapter is not the best I could put up especially after such an abyssmally gaping pause but part of the reason I stopped writing on it is because this chapter honestly makes me wince. I just need to post this so I can dive right back into writing lovecraftian bullshit. That is what I have to do. Get over the bad character introductions and there's more melting flesh I promise.


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